


devil in the details

by lifeincantos



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Good Omens Fusion, Angel and Demon AU, M/M, Mutual Pining, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Slow Burn, but those are only details, extremely incorrect facts about the age of the earth, extremely irreverent take on religion, zero knowledge of good omens required - we're off the rails with original mythos by now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-04-23 07:37:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19146481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeincantos/pseuds/lifeincantos
Summary: Very soon, the world is going to end.But we'll get to that. There are a few details we need to pick up along the way.(the good omens style angel & demon AU.)





	1. genesis.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in the beginning, god created the earth.

One of the better decisions the world, as a whole, has made has been allowing itself to proceed into the twenty first century.

At least, that is what Takashi Shirogane believes. Though, even if he is only one opinion, his has been formed through a very many millennia so if the passage of time strikes you as an important asset in determining the weight of one opinion, then you might say that his is well informed. If you care about meticulousness and care as well, those are also factors that inform Takashi Shirogane's opinion. Case in point: he is _meticulous_ in balancing the pros and cons of how humanity lives in the twenty first century, and he is _careful_ to say that while it is one of the better decisions, it was not humanity's best. There are many contenders for humanity's _best_ decision, including, but not limited to, the washing machine, fire, single malt scotch, and vaccines.

(Of important note is that Takashi Shirogane has only had personal experience with one of these. One and a half, depending on who you ask. But he is certainly capable of seeing the usefulness of the others, even if the good they do is something he should be more worried about, given everything.)

Takashi Shirogane had rather enjoyed the seventeenth century, in an effort to be honest. Some of it he had spent in Europe, but the world, no matter how small a place it truly is after five thousand years of walking it, consists of more than Europe. (Much to Europe's fervent denial, of course.) The bulk of it had been spent in Asia, Japan specifically; the conflicts there were smaller in scale than what he had expected, given what he had seen of the world, and it was there that he picked up particularly affinities in art and food and even names. To this day, Okinawa continues to be one of his favorite destinations when he finds that he needs to visit anywhere at all.

But what the twenty first century lacks in peace, and what it lacks in the global aftershocks of imperialism, it certainly makes up for in convenience and creature comforts. The clothing, for one, suits him just fine. There is something remarkable about what structured pants can offer in the way of confidence and steadying one's soul. Or whatever it is he has the calls itself a soul. Takashi Shirogane owns an impressive collection – of pants, yes, but also of everything else. Of shirts and jackets and boots, hats and gloves and many pairs of sunglasses.

This is, also, the best century so far for his hair.

These are small details, of course, but that is what most things are: a collection of small details. Takashi Shirogane has lived a long time, compared to the mortals he mingles with, but even he is a collection of the small details that have come to create the thing of which he is. He is an array of leather riding jackets hanging in his closet (which had, at different points in history, been robes and overcoats and waistcoats and many other things), precisely set and fairly pricey watches, an inked tattoo that stretches the jaws of a lion over his shoulder and up his neck, well coiffed hair done up in a style that blends in easily with the year he inhabits that still contains a tuft of white at the very front at odds with how the rest of it is black, and the 1951 Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle that he is currently astride, moving much faster and smoother than a 1951 Vincent Black Lightning reasonably should.

Perhaps he should give the twentieth century some credit, too. For perfecting a solid bike.

It roars as he races down the street. At the speed he is going, it would be foolish to count how high over the limit he's going; besides, it's not like he's going to hit anything. He never has before and he is not going to start today, when he has _things_ to do. His 1951 Black Vincent is both the fastest and smartest of its kind (its kind totaling _one_ ) and it knows better than to impede his progress.

As Takashi Shirogane rounds the corner and pulls up on the park it is important to note a few last details: the pigeons gathered don't fly away all in a shock at the sound of the bike so much as shifted a few inches to the left (as pigeons are wont to do), the person on the bench has the grace to look up at the noise (though it seems more out of politeness than genuine surprise), and for as long as Takashi Shirogane has had that name he has gone by Shiro (with only one exception).

The person on the bench looks not much older than Shiro himself – with lighter hair and darker skin, and reading glasses instead of sunglasses. But there is something in the way he sits up straight and serene that makes him come across not all that dissimilar to Shiro. Even though Shiro is swinging himself off a bike and striding to cross the distance between them looking every inch anathema to the other. Where he is decked in the best black leather the twenty first century has to offer, the other is wrapped up in pale earth tones and soft fabrics: cotton and cable knit, cream colors that seem caught in the glow of the sun, or whatever happens to be glowing around him. And yet there it is, that undeniable thing that might make some uninterested pedestrian glance their way and decide, idly, that a connection exists between them all the same.

(Things that logically cannot make sense, but still somehow do, are called _ineffable_.)

There is enough space on the bench that Shiro can sit comfortably far from the other while still stretching his arm over the back of the bench and leaning in. As soon as he is settled, the other turns back to the paper in his hands.

“That thing is a death trap,” he says while, ostensibly, reading.

“I'm not going to die.”

“I wasn't talking about you.”

“I missed you too, Adam.”

Adam makes a little sound in the back of his throat and turns a page. “I hope you have a good reason for interrupting my Sunday morning, Takashi.”

(Adam, of course, is the exception.)

“And on the seventh day the Almighty rested, yes of course.” Shiro tips his head down. It's not enough for Adam to see under his sunglasses, though there's not much difference between the pitch black of the lenses and the pitch black of his eyes. His brows are both quirked and his lips are set in a slanted line with intrigue and the only kind of sobriety he can manage these days – one touched with a sardonic Devil-May-Care wind.

(Depending on who you ask, the Devil does care about things. It makes sense, doesn't it? He was the first to Fall, and that very rarely happens without some conviction in the act. For our purposes, though, please note that there is a way Shiro couches things that make them seem less serious than they are. It was a habit he'd picked up around 1000 AD, or BCE as the humans say these days.)

(Please remember that he'd spent about five thousand years alive before that, and eternity has a way of changing a person.)

“I only thought you'd like to know that I've been hearing some chatter.”

Adam doesn't look up right away, but the paper crumples a little under his hands and for a moment the sunlight reflects off his glasses until they are as impenetrable with light as Shiro's are with dark. Shiro watches him, as slouched and leaned in as Adam sits upright.

Then Adam turns a page.

“Oh? So they're a talkative lot, are they?”

“You _know_ they aren't, Angel. You know that very well.”

The paper crumples a little more under Adam's hands. “And how do I know that?”

“Because it's the same with your lot, isn't it?”

Finally, Adam lowers the paper. He does it to turn and fix Shiro with a _look_ that begs to pierce through Shiro with the force of – something bright and burning and forceful. Some terrible storm or inferno or the like. Shiro does not look away.

“ _You_ don't know about my lot,” Adam replies, voice thin and far less amicable than it had been only moments ago. “You don't know what they do or don't do. You lost that right long ago.”

Shiro blinks, but it is hidden behind his glasses. “I suppose that's fair. I must be wildly off the mark, then. They keep you up to date with everything that's happening. Important for the guardian of Earth to know what he can of the Divine Plan and all.”

Adam pauses this time, and an expression crosses his face that Shiro cannot quite read. He wonders, for a moment, if it's because it's a kindness that he can't access or because Adam himself doesn't know what to think or to feel. If he did, Shiro supposes he'd be able to read that. After six thousand years, there's not much he hasn't seen.

Quietly, Adam says, “No one can _know_ the Divine Plan. It's – it's Divine. Sublime. Beyond the scope of those who dwell on Earth and those above and below.”

Shiro's lips press into something like a smile. “Then I was right. Not so chatty.”

“You're insufferable,” Adam replies.

“I prefer charming.” Shiro stands, and reaches out a hand. “Come on, I'll tempt you to lunch.”

“No wile nor false idol shall stray me,” Adam replies, eyes fixed on the paper. Shiro sighs.

“Then I'll _treat_ you. That Parisian place just opened, and I believe we have some miraculous reservation for noon.”

Adam looks up at him, and then his expression softens. “You know, it _has_ been a while since I've had anything truly French. D'you think their flamiche is up to standard?”

“You'd know better than I.”

“You're not wrong, Takashi.” Adam does not take his hand, but he stands all the same, folding the newspaper. “I hope you don't think I'm riding that death trap with you.”

“Angel, no one is going to die. Not you, not any pedestrian. I give you my word.”

Adam _hmphs_ at that. Shiro notes, though, that he takes the suddenly appearing second helmet without further argument. And just like that, Principal Angel of the Lord, Adam, sits neatly behind Takashi Shirogane, resident sentry Demon on Earth acting on behalf of the Great Adversary, to make his way to lunch at Maison Kayser.

(What neither angel nor demon knows now that they will be facing down is the end of the world. Of course, that is only one more detail in a tapestry very long in the making. It just happens to be a larger one than most.

But we will get to that.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's not my fault this time - am i supposed to not let the miniseries awaken my love for my favorite novel?? 
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com
> 
> playlist selection // [mr. blue sky ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7dTBoW5H9k)


	2. exodus.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> two times shiro leaves, and one time he doesn't.

Adam has been an angel of the Lord for as long as he has been, and has been a Principal Angel for nearly as long as that. Something that he will not say, not on pain of hellfire, is that he's not quite sure what it means, to be a Principal Angel. Certainly he has gratitude and humility in spades for the title, for ever if he is not sure of the specifications of his role in the Heavenly Order, he can always admit to the Almighty's generosity and omniscience. If She did not think him worthy of the title, he would never have received it.

For the most part, it does not seem to have been a sticking point. Adam has received no admonishment from the head office in all the time he has been doing whatever job assigned to him. Granted, that job has, largely, been to _watch the Earth_. Were he inclined, he might have asked what that entailed. The Earth, when he started the whole gig at its creation, seemed a large place, if somewhat devoid of life. But at that point in time, Adam had swallowed back the urge to inquire and had, instead, trusted in the Divine Plan of it all.

(Believing in something that seems improbable, or impossible, because of your trust in the one who has proposed, is sometimes to referred to as _faith_. Adam refers to this as faith, quite regularly, possibly because that is the one salient requirement he's sure of in the job description.)

That is what Adam did for a good thousand years: he watched. He watched as two humans became four, became eight, because a thousand and then ten thousand. He watched as life began to blossom, first at the very heart of the world nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (who would receive their names a little after they had provided the water and sustenance for the mortals beginning their lifelong journeys into becoming people) then spreading from what would be named the Middle East and Africa all the way out to all the corners of the globe. (Metaphorically speaking, given the shape of the Earth.) He watched the advent of agriculture, then permanent living. Hunting, gathering, the creation of art and communication and language, then languages after the Babel incident. The domestication of the wolves and sheep and goats. The cooperation.

The fights. The strife.

For a while, Adam could Feel one thing more than he could Feel anything else. That is the thing about angels: they're very sensitive to emotions. In Heaven, there is little variety in what those emotions are: faith, piety, a general sort of optimism that comes with unyielding trust. Actually, it wasn't until Adam watched the humans start their journeys in their first millennium of living that he felt something new. It was born at the bottom of riverbeds and overflowed their banks, spread like a great, soft, enveloping fog over the cradle of life and out to the continents just beginning to be inhabited.

Love was what Adam had felt. Not the Love of the Almighty, constant and never moving or changing. This love was different. This love flickered and gutted, sometimes, when other things clouded it over. But when it came to life, it caught like a blaze – like something that had always seemed too big for the human body to hold within itself (so finite, so fragile, so miraculous to be alive at all). It would put the sunlight to shame, always reaching and growing and _wanting_ to grow. Human love _wanted_ in a way that Adam had never known until he began his watch on Earth and he spent a thousand years Feeling that love.

But the other thing about humans is that they change. This, too, was something that Adam had to learn. They were never content to simply _be_ , to exist the way the Almighty had made them at the very start of things. They made more humans and traveled further, and learned things and created things. They loved each other fiercely and proudly (the latter worried Adam, sometimes, but then they _did_ have free will) but they fought, too. Sometimes they fought over small things, and sometimes they fought over large things. Sometimes, they fought enough to hurt each other.

Eventually, they learned how to kill each other.

That is always the turning point. Finding out that the power in your own two hands is greater than you had ever known. There is no turning back from that. Eve can attest to this fact.

Adam watched them love each other, and then he watched them hurt each other when the love gutted out. That was his job, to watch, and for a good long while there he thought he'd be very good at it. But humans change and perhaps angels do, too, when they live among them. Or maybe that is part of the Divine Plan, that Adam must Feel what they feel. It doesn't explain why the absence of love isn't as fierce as its presence – why he Feels nothing from them when they kill.

He is on a mesa watching a death-ceremony from a distance less than a thousand years after the Earth's creation when he feels a presence at his side. A rustle of feathers and cloth and a flash of black tell him all he needs to know; he keeps his eyes trained on the death-ceremony even when he addresses the other.

“Hello, Saephis.”

“Fancy seeing you here,” Saephis replies, settling beside the angel with more than enough space between them for their wings to stretch out. It's not something they indulge in frequently; it takes a very, very long time hiding wings for them to grow uncomfortable. But there is no one here to see but them, and neither can deny the relief that comes with allowing wing muscles to flex. Apparently, having a body is a difficult thing. (Adam had not been expecting it to be a difficult thing, and would never say so aloud. It is, after all, something given to him by his Almighty.)

“Is it?” Adam's voice is a little distant; his attention is not on Saephis.

When Saephis notices this, he looks once at Adam, then follows his gaze down to the humans. He hums something thoughtful and tuneless.

“Isn't this a bit dreary to watch?” Saephis asks, voice absent of the dry, sardonic edge it would carry in later years, after he'd changed his name at least two more times in the coming millennia. “All this death?”

“Watching is what I do, Saephis,” Adam replies. Saephis has heard this reply before.

“ _Well_ , there are better places to watch humans. The continents across the ocean – they're a little less populated. And mostly peaceful.”

“I don't think I'm meant for peace.”

Saephis falls silent at that, and it is enough to make Adam turn and catch his expression. Whatever he sees there, it prompts him to clear his throat and hurriedly amend his reply. “I just mean – I'm meant to _watch_. And this is where things are happening, so – it's my duty.”

“To watch,” Saephis says tentatively.

“To watch,” Adam confirms. “To know, I suppose. Only the things that I see before me. Even though I can't Feel anything.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Adam sighs, gesturing vaguely at the ceremony. “Normally, I Feel – well, a lot. Their thrill, their excitement, their triumphs. Their love. But now it's like – I can't Feel anything.”

Saephis is quiet for a moment. Then: “Grief.”

Adam looks at him again, eyes wide. “Pardon?”

“Grief.” Saephis is staring at the ceremony now, looking halfway to some other plane of existence. “They're feeling grief. The pain that comes when you no longer have the one you love.”

“ – Oh.”

Saephis does not say anything else. He could have, maybe, because he too Felt things. He Felt their anger, their hatred, their fear and desperation. He Felt their grief, when everything else has burned out and leaves them with nothing but the ashes of what they once had before it was destroyed. Before they destroyed it. He could have said that he'd Fall again, a hundred times, to never feel grief again.

But at the time, it doesn't bear mentioning. Adam looks troubled, and the expression seems out of place on an angel.

“It will be sunrise on the sea, soon,” Saephis says, looking back at Adam. By then, though, Adam's resumed looking straight ahead. Still, “If we leave now, we can get there in time to see it.”

“Mm.” The noncommittal noise in the back of Adam's throat is nothing but a placeholder. Saephis knows this, by now. “So sorry, I believe I should continue my watch. Besides – demon and all that. Wouldn't be right.”

Saephis glances down, though it is probably not visible given that his eyes are black as night all the way through, always. Then he hums again and stands, brushing some of the mesa's dust from his robes.

“Alright,” he says. “I'll be off then.”

It takes a few moments for Adam to tear his gaze from the ceremony down below. By the time he looks up, Saephis is gone.  
  


* * *

In a truly heartbreaking twist, Maison Kayser does not have flamiche on the menu. Adam had sighed and ordered a pan au chocolat to complement his espresso. The latter is better than the former, but he supposes that finding good French pastry outside France will always be a futile effort. It serves well enough; most of his attention is fixed on Shiro, anyway, who is determinedly making his way through the largest size coffee they have on the menu.

In lieu of asking, Adam raises a brow. Despite the sunglasses in the way, Adam is sure that Shiro shoots him a look right back. But Adam knows this rhythm. He keeps both of his hands primly folded on the table until Shiro finally puts his cup down.

“I take it that you want to hear more about this chatter,” he says.

“Yes,” Adam replies simply.

“Which means you believe me, that something big must be happening?”

“I don't see how that's relevant.”

Shiro sighs, long and well suffered. “Still so stubborn after how many millennia. Is that angelic of you, Angel?”

Adam looks down his nose at Shiro, undeterred. “You have until my espresso is gone to explain.”

Shiro slouches lower in his seat. “At least you're still no good at having fun, so. Heavenly points to you for that one. Alright, alright.” He takes one last swig from his cup then tilts his head down. Underneath his glasses, Adam is sure his eyes are closed until Shiro has ascertained that they are well and truly alone. (Gossip doesn't strike Adam as a _large_ vice, really, but apparently it counts enough that Shiro can Feel for it, for the eavesdroppers of the mortal and immortal kinds.)

Satisfied, Shiro sits up enough to place his elbows on the table and lean in. “Head office had me in D.C. for a few weeks. No assignment at first, just tempted a few arguments, ruffled a few feathers. – So to speak. But I got instructions to make sure that some communication went through at the White House.”

“Communication?” Adam's brow furrows in the way that it does when something has truly caught him up. He, too, leans in. Though he does keep his elbows off the table. “What communication?”

Shiro shrugs. “I have no idea. _I'm_ not too proud to admit that they don't keep me in the loop on these things.”

“Takashi –”

“Alright, alright. I don't know, I don't know what it means. But seriously, they _don't_ give me jobs like this. They just – ask for memos, give me a pass every hundred years, and I go back to sowing discord and the like.”

“When was the last time you sowed anything?” Adam asks, a little dryly in a way that almost sounds like humor. Shiro huffs a breath.

“Not my fault that the humans are so good at doing my job for me. But listen, this means something, right? It _has_ to – I'm the representative they've got up here, and that's the point of a representative. To make sure that everything goes according to plan.”

“The Divine Plan?” Adam asks, confused. Shiro shrugs again.

“Whatever you want to call it. Holy, Unholy, Ineffable. Whatever the plan is, I've got to make sure it goes off. You, too. For your lot.”

Adam narrows his eyes, then looks down altogether. He toys with his half eaten pan au chocolat. “That's – I can't say that's wrong. In the abstract. But watching over some communication, _even_ if it's in the capitol – and _I_ haven't heard anything of the like.”

“Adam, that's all I'm asking.” Shiro leans in further, moving to adjust his sunglasses, perhaps slip them down his nose a little. But maybe he remembers that Adam won't be able to read the expression of pitch black eyes anyway and thinks better of it. “Just – listen. If you hear any chatter when you report in, if anyone visits or contacts you.”

“Why?”

Adam's expression is impassive. Shiro's is – bewildered. A little. Peaking out from under the layers of disaffected, Devil-May-Metaphorically-Care distance he's cultivated over the years.

“Because,” he starts, haltingly. “Because I – because this is _different_. Because I have a bad feeling about all this, since everything my lot does is – well. _You know_. And it would do us both better to know than _not_ to know.”

(Believing in something that seems improbable, or impossible, because of your trust in the one who has proposed, is sometimes to referred to as _stupid_. Shiro used to refer to this as stupid, many millennia ago, but one day stopped abruptly. No one is sure why.)

(Well. Perhaps _someone_ does, but Adam is the only being that regularly associates with Shiro, and he doesn't know why.)

“That's not really for us to decide,” Adam says simply. “All things revealed as they will be, in due time and with due cause.”

“Adam –”

“Besides,” Adam continues. If there is a note of strain in his voice, it is well concealed. “That is far more – _direct_ a request than giving each other the space to do as we will. Built on nothing more than a vague sense that something might not be quite right.”

“Wh – but – _Adam_.” Shiro's voice catches on something. “Are you – don't you _trust_ me?”

“Of course not.” There is something steely in Adam's tone. More than clipped or merely polite. “Why should I? We're enemies, after all. You're a demon, if you don't mind my reminding you.”

Shiro stares at him for at least a full minute. Assumedly; his eyes are covered, after all.

Then he stands, slow and confident and steady. Where his hand had been sitting, there is now money. More than enough, probably to cover what they've eaten or haven't eaten. Leaving his chair pushed out, Shiro walks away from the table.

“You're right,” he says evenly before he goes. Quieter, in a way that Adam has trouble hearing, Shiro adds, “You're always right.”

It's not cruelly said, but Adam remains staring at the seat Shiro has vacated long after he's gone. It takes him a while before he sighs and props his elbow on the table, letting his head fall against it, braced by his palm. Against the flesh of his hand, he murmurs, “Takashi.”

Adam has done his job for some six thousand years. What that job is, he can't say for sure. But there are a few things he does know absolutely: that faith is an integral part of an angel's very physiology, and that it's not only angels that can get in serious trouble for consorting with the other side.

He's never understood why Shiro doesn't seem to be very mindful of that particular rule.  
  


* * *

Rome in the year 98 AD (the humans will not call it CE for some time yet) is not, technically, the center of the world, but it is where most things are happening. For once, Saephis will have to give it its due. It's certainly a _large_ empire, though one might argue that conquering and capturing one's neighbors will often due the trick of increasing your nationhood. He's not keen on seeing what the arenas are up to today; sports, bloody or otherwise, aren't nearly as exciting to him as they seem to be to everyone else.

Besides, what he's looking for isn't at the Colosseum.

It's easy to spot Adam through the crowd; his tunic is a startling white, though he's sure that Adam has tried to make it less conspicuous. Ah well, there's only so much you can do to change how the inner light (or inner void) within you presents itself on the outside. Saephis' glasses won't be in style until long, long after he's changed his name for the third time and goes by Shiro, but it's better than the alternative. Long term miracles, a constant glamouring, seems like such a waste of energy. The same way quelling an angelic glow is probably not the best use of Adam's time.

He cuts through the crowd with the devil's luck, never stopped once until he finds himself leaning against the same stall that Adam is currently patronizing, smiling softly as he hands over the coins for his drink. There is a certain shining softness in the set of his expression that the merchant seems touched by. Saephis watches him as long as he possibly can, then looks down when it all becomes too much and his eyes begin to burn.

“Did you _need_ to bless him?” Saephis asks when Adam steps away. He falls into step with the angel. “I mean, it gets to be a little much, doesn't it?”

“I don't know why it still surprises me, your lack of understanding of divine grace.”

“I suppose I'm just a poor study.” Saephis' lips are set in a curving line, almost like a smile. There's a lackadaisical quality in his voice that has become a permanent resident in the last few years. “I saw your handiwork with the lions, you know.”

“I'm sorry?”

Saephis grins a little wider at Adam's denial in not so many words. “Oh come now. You speak to the managers at that Colosseum, touch them with some angelic light, and the next day all the lions are free. No longer having to suffer the torment of blades, and of killing, right?”

“I've no idea what you're talking about. There's nothing wrong with spreading the Almighty's love to those in need of it.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Oh, drink and be quiet.”

Where Adam had been carrying one drink there is now another, one that he offers Saephis. Saephis looks at it, blinking once before he reaches out – slowly, carefully, and takes the drink in his hands. It is cold and sweet as the ripest fruit in the summer.

As they wind their way together through the forum, Saephis drinks and is silent.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i still can't believe we're here. 
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com
> 
> playlist selection // [i can't decide ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buYrBbwyCGE)


	3. numbers.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> angels and demons aren't the only people that measure their lives in details. humans do, too.

When Allura was six years old, her father sat her down and told her that she was magic.

Actually, what he told her was that she _possessed_ magic, a family magic, handed down by her father, and his mother, and her father, and so on and so forth. But at the time, Allura had been six and her fist thought upon hearing the news was _how wonderful, she was magic_. If she had had friends, then, it might have been the kind of thing she would have told them, proudly. They could make a game of it, play at being witches or wizards, or heroes, or fairy godmothers. She would have made sure to resolve the inevitable arguments that broke out amongst her peers with a kind of wisdom that would surprise the adults around her but seem perfectly reasonable to young minds that seek to temper their imaginations with structure where they can find it. If someone had argued that their role was not important enough in the game, Allura would have looked at them soberly and said _but that isn't true. I need your help, if you can give it_. And any fights would have been entirely avoided.

This never happened, though, because Allura did not grow up with friends. Not in the traditional sense, at least. See, Allura had grown up on what is usually called the Estate. Even she called it that, sometimes, though when she was younger she alternated with calling it _home_. For all intents and purposes that is what it was. It was her family's home, and it had been for a long, long time. Way up, hidden in the hills, where the morning fog always pressed against Allura's windows like low hanging clouds, the Estate had been built hundreds of years ago. It was built when the town below had been far less populated, but even now it is hidden by the dense brush of the dark, green woods that the hills are flush with.

You can call the Estate beautiful; some do. Mostly made of soft whites and glimmering turquoise tiles it looks like it might be more at home in the sunshine, in a place where the sea meets the shore and waves lap gently over stone and sand. Allura would think about that, sometimes. What it might be like to go to the seaside – to find out if saltwater stings, and how long one can float in it. To wear soft dresses that catch the breeze and gaze out over the lilac and rose tinted sunset that always looked like a painting in every book she's ever read about the ocean.

But the sea is for books. The Estate, as it stands, is large as a city block and it's full of libraries and studies and vast kitchens. There are tennis courts enclosed by tall fences in the back, and bedrooms with billowing canopies over the beds. The basement has a movie room that is more the size of a theater than anything that should rightfully fit in a private home, and below that there are more rooms than Allura has ever been able, or allowed, to explore. Gardens branch off from the tennis courts, full of wildflowers and overgrown grasses. One of the rooms upstairs has circular walls made entirely of glass, and from there one can see the ocean of deep green pine trees that decorate the hills, and the mountains that rise forbiddingly behind the estate. The Estate boasts enough space that it takes hours to explore all of its rooms, its hallways, its secrets. And even then, you won't find everything.

What the Estate _lacks_ is people.

At least, people that stay.

Sometimes, her father leaves for his work. But just as often, he conducts his affairs in the Estate. Allura has never been _quite_ sure what he gets up to; every time he summons one or all of his board members, they seem to be poring over some new crisis or planning for some new charity. When she was very young, Allura used to play a game: she would try to last as long as possible eavesdropping on her father's meetings. Her longest run of that was seven minutes and thirty two seconds when she was five before she was eclipsed by her father's shadow that fell over her and the large, potted ferns alike. He had leveled her with a long, stern look, then had promptly plucked her up from her hiding spot, tossed her gently in the air, and caught her in his arms on the way down.

“No fair!” Allura had said between breathless laughs. “I think you're cheating.”

“Do you?” Her father, Alfor, had replied. “Then it's up to you learn how I'm doing it, isn't it?”

Well, that seemed fair enough. Fairer still was giving Allura time to say hello to all four of her father's coworkers before asking Coran to shuttle Allura to the kitchen for dessert before bed.

Coran, at least, was a person who stayed. One of the only ones, in fact. He had been in the house just as long as Allura could remember, and she knew that he had been there before even she had. Her father called him an _advisor_ , and her mother (when her mother had been with them) called him a _dear friend_. Allura usually called him _Coran_. After all, that's who he was. He certainly wore many hats around the estate; Allura would see him cooking in the kitchen, pruning in the garden, rewiring the lights. It was a well known fact to the Estate's three other occupants (which would become two other occupants within a few years) that Coran's great, great, great, great, _great_ grandfather had been the architect of the Estate, and every Wimbleton (or, in Coran's case, Wimbleton-Smythe) that came after him had contributed to the Estate's continued existence, restoration, and expansion.

(“Does that mean,” Allura had asked once, as she was falling asleep. “That your family and my family have been friends for a long time?”

Coran, putting down the story he'd been reading her, had nodded. “Yes. Yes it does.”

“So will we be friends forever?”

Coran had smiled, but Allura had already allowed her eyelids to slip closed. Forever, he didn't say, is a very long time, and he had no idea what the future would hold. But perhaps even in the light of day, some truths don't need to be spoken – the perfunctory ones, the theoretical ones.

When he'd said, “I think so,” he had very much believed it. And maybe that's all anyone needs.)

Many of Coran's hats included something to do with Allura. Tutoring her (in history, mostly; her father had other tutors come in for the other subjects), making sure that she ate and slept on a regular schedule, assuring that in the moments she wasn't studying or spying on her father or painting with her mother that she was occupied with something that could hold her attention. When she was young, he'd impressed her with his sleight of hand. As she grew older, he would secret her the books that her father wanted her to wait to read. He also never told on her when she took seconds of dessert.

After her mother passed when she was ten, he was the one who would find the hiding spaces she'd wedge herself into.

Her favorite (for lack of a better word) was a small balcony off an unused bedroom on the third floor. He found her there often, braced against the metal railing, watching the sparrows alight on the twisted, intricately shaped metal. The first time he'd found her there, Coran had made his presence known. He'd called out to her, with every intention of asking her to come in from the winter chill. What he was met with was not the Allura that dazzled everyone who crossed over the threshold of the Estate but something else: something soaked in bitterness and sharp edged and bleeding. He found her yelling loud enough to rattle the railing and send the birds flying.

(What you have to understand, here, is that Allura is human, and this is what human grief is. It, like love, is too large and too much to be contained in small, fragile, finite human bodies. But humans live with it anyway so they do what they can to survive against emotions so large that they seek to rip themselves free from the seams that hold humans together.

Coran, though, is human, too. He understood his mistake. When her father came for her, on Coran's information, Allura's grief did what human things do: it had changed. Father and daughter sat on the balcony for a long while after that, crying themselves into a storm and then settling like so much snow over stone – tired and waiting for spring.)

In the moment we are seeing, though, Allura is still six and her father has just changed her entire world by telling her that she is, or possesses, magic.

What she wants to do is ask as many questions as she can conjure up. What can she do? Can she talk to animals? Can she make the plants grow? Can she make sparkles that light up the room? Can she blink all of her favorite desserts into existence in the privacy of her bedroom, where no one can tell her that she's ruining her dinner? Can she call birds and rabbits and mice to her, for the company? Will she use wands or words, and how long will it be until she learns to teleport?

When Alfor tells Allura that she possesses magic, he is not thinking of any of this. What he is thinking, in that moment, is that he wishes he could have told her sooner – that, of course, it's no one's fault that she would not have been able to understand any of this at any younger, but also that time in this world is finite and fickle; intentions don't matter, for the world never takes intentions into account. Good deeds go punished and unpunished and none of it happens for any discernible reason, or in any discernible pattern. He is as sad to give her the burden as he is sad that he could not have given it sooner, given her any more time than what he has to do what needs to be done.

(I'm sure you know by now that Alfor is human, too. Sometimes, humans are capable of a remarkable ability to see beyond the confines of the single moments they occupy. Alfor was cleverer than most, and wiser, though whether that was his magic or his person or both one can never really say for sure. But he is still human and that is how human emotions are: alive, contradictory, and constantly wanting.

Just like humans.)

“Allura,” he says, sober enough that Allura's flights of fancy never have a chance to leave her lips. Her restless energy stills into something more alert and she watches her father with wide, trusting eyes.

(She is so young, but she won't always be and Alfor doesn't know which is more the cause for grief.)

So, with her attention on him, Alfor begins to tell her the stories. He tells her that as far back as anyone can remember of their family, they have always been able to do things that others could not. Everyone's magic takes a slightly different shape. His own great-great grandfather, for example, was incredibly skilled with dowsing rods that would, inevitably, unearth precisely the resource he needed for himself or the town down below the hill. (In those days, the Estate had been much smaller and much more time had been spent in the world below.) His great grandmother would be able to hear secrets in the plants: emotions left behind that would whisper to her of whatever human heart had bled its feelings all over them. One of their earliest ancestors was a prophet (a seer, an oracle, whatever you'd like to call it). She would see things that wouldn't occur for minutes, days, months, years, millennia, and many of her prophecies had been contained in a volume that had been passed down to every generation that had come after her.

Alfor gives Allura the book that night, on the condition that she take very good care of it, and that she devote herself to her studies: of her family's visions, of their magic, of the world. Allura takes the book between her hands, and is struck for a moment with the sensation that if she clasps it too hard it will fall apart at her touch.

It doesn't do that. In fact, as the days turn into years Allura forgets her initial reservations about the book. She also forgets her initial wonder at the prospect of possessing (or being) magic. Magic, as it turns out, is mostly comprised of learning. Through a series of tutors (all the best in their fields) Allura learns classic literature, seven different languages fluently, chemistry and biology and physics, mathematics, and, of course, history. (The last, it should come as no surprise, is her favorite.) She spends most of her days poring over some book or another, practicing an endless litany of practice problems or testing her grip on languages by having long conversations with no one in particular, quietly pausing every so often to correct her own grammar.

Allura doesn't spend all of her time in the Estate, though her trips beyond it are few and far between. She had asked her father, once, why they stay so secluded, and his answer (“That is the just the way it's been done”) had sat like some itchy, out of place thing in the pit of her stomach. But what else could she do? She had been young, and had trusted her parents fiercely enough to tell herself that they understood what was best for her, and for the family.

(Unquestioning belief comes in many different names, depending on who you ask. Allura calls hers love.)

Whatever did or did not frustrate Allura, the only one she ever really expressed was that in her magic. Her father, she had come to learn, had some of their ancestor's precognition – a certain kind of knowing that led him to make decisions that turned out for the best. While he couldn't see things as grand as full, complete visions, he always just seemed to _know_ what to do and it was powerful enough for Allura to envy his ability, his confidence.

Sometimes, if she tried hard enough, Allura could feel the emotions of those around her. She could feel her father's courage – and then, when she had practiced more, she could feel more nuanced things like hesitation and consternation. She could feel Coran's loyalty, his pride, his worry. She could feel her mother's adoration, carefulness, faith. (After her mother passed, for a long while Allura could feel only her own emotions; her howling, sobbing grief was loud enough to drown anything else out.) But these, to Allura, were small things, and inconsistent in their execution, and there were days when she could not bear to look at her textbooks, atlases, and her book of prophecies, for the rage that comes with a keening, abject helplessness in the face of one's own failure.

(You will come to understand what Allura can do, what shape her magic takes, but don't forget that she is human and for humans, every kind of learning takes time.)

A great many more things have happened to Allura over the course of her lifetime, but we must focus on the details that make the most sense to us. And the next detail that makes sense to the story is to find her in the present day. See, Allura is no longer six. She is eighteen, now, and Coran finds her on the balcony off the unused bedroom on the top floor. The balcony has been transformed since Allura was six. The wrought iron still remains, but now it acts as the support for as many flower boxes as will fit along the railing. Hanging baskets bend over it as well, all of them blooming with color – geraniums, petunias, poppies, marigolds. Hummingbird feeders and other-bird feeders are fixed to the walls and dangling from cords, and there is a small chair pushed against the corner topped with a well worn cushion.

(These things, perhaps, are not the most important details when you consider that the world is going to end at some point in the near future. But they are important to Allura, and what is life if not choosing the details that mean the most to you and holding them close?)

Currently, Allura is misting the geraniums. It hasn't rained in some time, and though she is always careful not to drown any of the plants that live on the balcony, she worries about leaving their nutrition to the whims (or lack thereof) of nature. Coran watches her gently give the geraniums just enough of what they need – then a little bit extra. Her hand lowers slowly when she is done, and when she addresses him she doesn't turn around at first.

“Everything's packed,” she tells him.

“I know,” he replies, kindly.

Allura is silent for a moment. There is a sparrow that has landed among the poppies. She watches it for a moment.

Quieter, she says, “I have the strangest feeling, Coran. Like – I'll never see home again.”

Coran waits until she turns to him and he can see her expression, a little drawn (but then, it has been for the last three years), and little apprehensive (which it sometimes has been, her whole life). Allura has never shown a capacity for knowing like her father did, when he was with them. But they are both human and human intuition is a remarkable thing.

So is human anxiety, and human fear.

Coran wants to say something soothing, something like, _you're only going to school_. Or, _I'll be sure to keep the place up until you come back_. But by the time he settles on something, Allura has put down her mister on the little table by the railing and has crossed the distance between them. She touches his arm once, briefly, and her expression has changed: firm, chin held high, steely gazed.

“I will be back,” she tells him, with a kind of youth in her voice that sometimes leaves her, in the moments when the grief is too much. “I will be home again, one day.”

As she sweeps past him, Coran ducks his head and smiles.

“Of course, Allura.”  
  


* * *

  
“I _really_ just don't think this is a good idea, man.”

“Are you kidding? We have to figure this guy out. C'mon.”

“Ah, jeez.”

Hunk Garret and Lance McClain are also eighteen, though in full disclosure this takes place about a week after Allura leaves the Estate and boards a plane, bound for college and her first time living anywhere other than home. Hunk and Lance, of course, are already there one week later. What they are doing there at the moment, though, is not learning. At least, not in the traditional sense, the sense that gives you degrees and accolades from your professors. It's far more likely that _this_ kind of learning would be frowned upon – by the administration, yes, but also by most people with enough common sense to respect things like _personal privacy_ and _boundaries_.

This is, to a small degree, what Hunk is worried about. More than that, though, he is worrying because Lance is guiding them to the door that they're _not_ supposed to open, the one that leads to the roof, and Hunk really doesn't want to explain to his parents why he's been kicked out of college before classes even start. (He knows that expulsion is probably a little more severe than what will happen if they're caught, but like Lance and Allura, Hunk is human and there's no helping that.)

Lance looks around the hallway – empty, this time of night – and decides that this is the perfect time to execute a forward roll. It makes a lot more noise than simply walking the distance between here and the door, and he bangs his head on the door as he comes to a stop, but then he springs back to his feet as if he'd never done anything graceless at all. (A detail Lance holds dear is that he's seen every action movie worth seeing, from _Die Hard_ to the entire catalog of _James Bond_ entries, and he has strict opinions about every single one of them.) He examines the doorframe for a moment before pointing excitedly glancing between it and Hunk.

“Look!” His whisper is loud enough to be heard across the hallway, and it prompts Hunk to race over to prevent Lance from yelling and waking up half the dorm. “See? Look, I was right, I called it.”

“Lance, keep it down, _please_ –”

“Hunk, _look_.”

Hunk looks, and for a moment he wants to protest the futility of it all. But something that Hunk holds dear is that he's pretty clever. More than that, he's _smart_ – he likes to know how things work – things and people and the world, really, and he's got a mind that looks for clues and patterns no matter what his anxiety is doing. So, of course, he sees what Lance sees. He sees that the door is propped open. Which is only notable because this door, in particular, is almost always locked, since it leads up to the roof.

“Lance.” Hunk's voice is thinning, his argument weakening. “We don't know that it's him –”

“I told you,” Lance says, “I _saw_ him. He's up there. We're roommates, right? So it's our job to get to know him. And whatever weird hobbies he has that have him sneaking out to the roof at two a.m.”

“Oh come _on_.” Hunk is whining, now, even though Lance has already slipped through the door. Following him, Hunk complains, “You're just looking for drama, man. Wouldn't you rather be sleeping? Sleeping is _great_. It makes you feel, like, not dead in the morning.”

Lance doesn't answer him, but Hunk was not expecting any different. Hunk has known Lance since the first grade, and has often found that Lance can tell the difference between Hunk's true anxieties and his perfunctory ones. So uncannily so, in fact, that Hunk had started to use Lance as his own personal weather vane – when Lance forges bravely onward, Hunk finds that his own fears fade into vague irritations and he follows.

Initially, the thought of moving across the country to go to a school located in the desert was not something that appealed to Hunk. What _did_ appeal to Hunk, what he had fought for for ages in the face of his parents' worries, was the school's reputation in the scientific field. There is no better institution in the country for aspiring physicists, engineers, and astronomers. Hunk is not quite sure where he fits in that collection of hopeful to-bes, largely because he is both passionate about and talented at all three branches of education. (Something to know about humans is that it's a rare thing, for passion and talent to be separated. Truth be told, the latter is usually made from the former – love is a powerful motivator, in its many iterations.) The distance, and the desert conditions, paled in comparison to the chance to take all of his passion and all of his talent and learn how to make things with his two hands and his mind.

The desert, so far, is not quite as bad as he'd been imagining. (Few things are.) It's hot in the day and cold at night, sure, but he has air conditioning and heating and classmates all around him that are experiencing this with him. That is really all he'd ever needed – a few accommodations to make things more livable, and the knowledge that he is not alone. (He'd never been alone, though, not in this, because this is usually all humans need to go about living.)

One unexpected and delightful benefit is being able to see the stars.

This far from the major cities, the stars are splattered across the sky with such dazzling nerve that the moment Hunk has climbed the stairs and followed Lance out the second door, he has to stop for a few moments to simply look at them. (What he is not thinking about, in that moment, is that he is only the latest person to do so across the expanse of history. He resonates with the awe and reverence of everyone that has come before him; he breathes the same air, and he watches the same light over the same Earth.)

Lance has already made his way across the roof, hiding in every shadow and against all the hoods of all the vents until he is directly behind their prey for the night. Their prey, who is hunched over two different laptops and sporting headphones large and industrial enough that Hunk doubts he'd hear a thunderstorm.

Their prey, also known as their third and final roommate in their Freshman suite, is called Pidge. Called by themselves, mostly, as Pidge is not the name they started this life with. But Hunk is also not the name Hunk started with – he just likes it. Names are simply more things to choose and hold dear, in the end.

Hunk walks in his normal gait to join them. Lance is carefully leaning over Pidge's shoulder – or, as carefully as Lance ever is. Which means that it's only a minute of trying to spy before he loses his balance and manages to bash his chin into Pidge's shoulder on the way down. Hunk sighs at the same time Pidge jumps.

“What the _hell_ –” Pidge manages to not knock over his entire setup, which on a roof could be a devastating thing, and Hunk breathes a little sigh of relief. Less relieving is the glare that Pidge levels him with – the both of them, even though this had been all Lance's idea in the first place, and you don't see _Hunk_ knocking anyone over, thanks very much.

“What the _hell_ are you doing?”

Lance looks more put out than anyone rightfully should, after spying on someone. (Particularly after spying so badly that they fall right on top of them.) “I could ask _you_ the same question!”

“I'm _not_ the one who –”

“ _You're_ the one who sneaks up on the roof every night – which is totally against the rules, by the way. I thought you were just making secret phone calls or writing poetry or something!”

Pidge makes a face, and quietly says, “ _Poetry_ ,” in a tone that Hunk usually uses for the pseudo science in television shows. Louder, Pidge says, “Why the hell do you think any of this is your business?”

“Hey, we're roommates, man! I have to know what creepy stuff you do –”

“No one said it was creepy!”

Hunk finds his attention on the argument dwindling, largely because that passion and talent he has in spades are directing his focus elsewhere. Specifically, to the screens that Pidge has open. One screen dedicated to a task each – the first steadily calculating and recalculating the latitudes and longitudes and weather conditions of a topographical map of what has to be this state, given the shape of the area. The other screen, though –

“Light emission spectrums?”

Pidge immediately disengages from Lance as Hunk puzzles over his work, then leans in as if to put himself between the screens and Hunk.

“Hey! The same goes for you, too. Not yours to touch.”

“Why are you looking at maps and light emission spectrums?”

“Are you listening to me at all?”

Lance leans back in, looking a little put out that Pidge has found a different target. “What, you scanning for aliens or something?” He asks, clearly seeking a fight. When he doesn't receive one, though, both he and Hunk cock their heads to the side.

“Seriously?” Asks Lance, a little weakly.

“Did you find anything?” Asks Hunk, a little softly. When Lance shoots him a look, Hunk shrugs. “That's how science works, man. You have to ask the questions if you want the answers.”

Maybe it is Hunk's assessment that softens Pidge, too. Or maybe it is something else – a simpler kind of tiredness, a sort of weight that secrecy and pain can burden the human soul with until it slowly begins not to lose its will to fight (that's the thing about humans; they never lose that will), but seeks something kindred and familiar.

Sighing, Pidge scoots back enough to allow Hunk to sit next to her.

(That is a detail about Pidge: her name is not the only secret she is keeping.)

“Not yet,” she says, the fight in her voice replaced by something contemplative. Lance sits softly beside the both of them, his expression less hurt and more gently curious. “But there's something out there. I know there is.”

Pidge's voice might be softer than Hunk's known all the week they've been living together, but there is something in the tone of it that makes him swallow back the questions he might ask in reply.

Instead, he looks toward the indigo horizon.  
  


* * *

Somewhere between the moment that Allura leaves the Estate and Hunk and Lance find Pidge on the roof, Keith opens the door to Leophis & Co. Records.

The record store has existed long, long before Keith has existed at all, but he navigates the dark, crowded rows of records (mostly vinyl, some CDs, some 45s, all used and still, somehow, in magnificent condition) without bumping into a single thing. Some things are new since his last visit – another case housing more music that he's never heard of (that he's sure is only in the best of taste, like everything else, even if it's all old), a box on the floor, but these also prove no obstacle to Keith. There are no near misses as he cuts through aisle after aisle – the place has always looked bigger on the inside than on the outside, and it's surprisingly far reaching.

It had looked bigger the first time Keith had visited the place. That was because, at the time, he'd been ten and far smaller than he is now, at eighteen. There is a world of difference that a foot of growing can do – a foot of growing and years of hearing the bell at the door grow familiar in its chime as he walked through it day after day.

The first time, Keith had opened the door with his chest puffed up and a kind of determination in his eyes that is directionless because at ten, your direction is always nowhere and everywhere. It wants, of course (as you must know by now, Keith is and has always been human), which had been enough for ten year old Keith to fight his way through crowded rows of records (he didn't recognize what they were) and CDs (he recognized those) to find the proprietor at the counter.

(This was a stroke of fortune; Keith did not know at the time that the shop's owner was very rarely at the counter, or at the shop at all. But on that day, they had found each other with little fuss.)

The shop owner was perched on a stool, feet up on one of the boxes behind the counter. An old rock song that Keith did not know was playing from the turntable behind him. He cleared his throat, but the man did not seem to hear him. So, he did what he had to do.

“ _Excuse me_.” Keith's voice was loud enough to be heard over the record, but the man behind the counter took his time in acknowledging Keith. It was a slow thing, the way he moved languidly, picking his head up and leaning forward to look down his nose at Keith from behind his sunglasses. (Keith did not know why he was wearing sunglasses in a dark shop on an overcast day, but he wasn't particularly curious about it so he didn't ask. It was for the best; he wouldn't have gotten a satisfactory answer anyway.)

After a few moments of silently looking at him, the man said: “You're excused.”

Keith's brow furrowed.

“No, I just wanted your attention.”

“Oh, well in _that_ case.” There was something in the man's voice that Keith both hated and felt particularly drawn to – as if his own rough edges were seeking out someone else's. “What is it you need my attention for?”

“I want a job.”

 _That_ , at least, caused the man to pause. Something in his devil-may-care expression flickered. He leaned forward enough to put his elbows on the counter.

“– Aren't you, like, six?”

A detail that was important to Keith was his age. Not just the fact that he was ten, but the fact that he had seen plenty in his ten years – he had ten years of knowing and learning, and of grief too that howled in rage in his veins whenever he wasn't doing something to make it stop howling. As a ten year old, Keith's outlets for quelling that howling, angry grief were few and far between, particularly when his home was shared with ten other kids, all without families. His knuckles were often covered in bruises and his lips were etched in a near permanent scowl.

He scowled then, and nearly kicked the counter.

“I'm _ten_ , and I need a job.”

The man sighed a little. “Last time I checked, ten's still too young. It's not London, 1839.” (Like most of history, London in 1839 had been a little dreadful to children.)

“The guy outside told me not to take no for an answer.”

“Did he, now?”

“So give me a job.”

“And why should I do that?”

“Because I need it.”

The man leaned forward again, head canting curiously to the side. “What do you need a job for?”

Keith crossed his arms against his chest. “That's none of your business.”

“And you're none of mine.” Behind the man, the record player made its way to the next song.

The howling in Keith's chest raged.

“Well _he_ said _you_ need help. It's a win-win.”

“It's a – oh for – _someone's_ sake. I hate him sometimes.” The man scrubbed a hand against the lower half of his face. If Keith could have seen his eyes (he could not) he would have seen them flicker in the general vicinity of the large storefront window on the other side of the room. “Who was he, anyway? Get his name?”

“Well – no –”

“You shouldn't be talking to strangers, Kid.”

“I don't know your name, so aren't you a stranger?”

“Case in point.”

Keith made a growling sound in the back of his throat.

“So, that's it?”

“That's about it. Close the door behind you on the way out.”

Keith did close the door behind himself on the way out that day, hard enough to shake the wood and make the bell ring. The next time he came in, it was a little more subdued, and accompanied by the older woman who ran the group home that Keith was legally and officially a ward of. Apologetically, she passed a CD back to the shop owner sitting behind the counter. (It was a _Best of Queen_ album, if you're wondering.)

“I'm so sorry,” she said, and she probably did feel very sorry. She had one of those faces – soft but worn, kind but a little untrusting. “He didn't mean to take it.”

“Oh?” The man leaned forward, glancing down at Keith. “That's a strange mistake to make.”

Keith looked stubbornly back at him. The woman cleared her throat awkwardly.

“Well,” she replied, “I mean – he's a little – he's a good kid, really, he just was a little upset, I think. I am sorry that he came in here at all. Keith, what do you have to say?”

Keith said nothing. The man looked at him curiously.

Then the man asked: “So, you like Queen?”

Keith looked up at him, startled. “... No?”

“That's a shame.” Sitting back, the man looked at the woman with a broad, easy smile on his face. “Don't worry about it – everything's as it should be, now. No harm, no foul.”

Her face collapsed a little in relief. “Thank you,” she said – and then, realizing that Keith wouldn't say the same, she added, “He thanks you, too. Come on, Keith.”

“Hang on.” They pause, and the man stands up, sliding the CD back to Keith. “Might as well get something out of this. Listen to the whole thing, then listen to it again. Start cultivating some good music sense.”

The woman looked a little flustered, but Keith took the CD anyway, looking warily at it, then back up at the man. What he didn't say aloud, lest the woman hear, was that there was a card with the CD now, bearing the name of the store and a date and time and two words.

 _You're hired_.

It has been eight years since then, and in those eight years Keith has learned to navigate Leophis & Co. like a second home. Or a first home. An only home. Whatever you want to call it. He doesn't bother with the counter – Shiro's never there.

“Shiro, don't tell me you're sleeping on the job again.”

Keith opens the backroom door with ease, and yes, Shiro is laid out on the couch. But there's music playing and he's staring off into space behind his sunglasses. When Keith enters, Shiro lets his head fall in his direction, an easy, cutting grin on his lips.

“So sorry, Boss,” he replies. Keith snorts. He's never said he doesn't like the joke, which has been enough for Shiro.

(Shiro, of course, had never asked a ten year old to do any actual work in the store, which Keith caught onto when he was about fourteen and had a better sense of how the world worked. But at that point, he'd abandoned his “important tasks” of music appreciation and inventory guarding and had started doing things a store usually needs: cleaning, restocking, running the register. Shiro had promoted him to CEO, which Keith didn't think meant anything at all, and continued to spend most of his time in the backroom or off the premises entirely.

But Keith still found himself with money, twice a month. Usually cash.)

“One of these days, I won't be here to make sure that your store actually functions as a store.” As Keith sits down on the couch, Shiro sits up and makes room.

“Well, let me know when that is so I can toast to it.”

“ _Shiro_.” Keith's voice drops a little, takes on that tone that means Shiro has to stop with the jokes before he sends Keith spiraling or sullen or sad. So Shiro does. He sits up a little straighter and levels his attention on his only, and star, employee.

“What's going on?” The question comes softer, less wickedly humored.

Keith draws a breath. And then another. He curls his fingers into his palm which is braced against his knee. “I – got that scholarship. For school. I, uh, I can afford it. I can go.”

Shiro looks at him, steady and strong, and then stands up abruptly. Keith watches him with a furrowed, concern brow as Shiro digs through the inventory of the backroom, muttering to himself as he moves aside boxes and piles of records and knick-knacks that Keith has never pressed to see. He makes a noise of triumph and returns with a champagne bottle (which Keith does not know is a Krug Clos d'Ambonnay) and two glasses.

“Wait – Shiro, it's not –”

“It _is_ a big deal, Keith.”

“Okay – but –” Keith runs a hand through his hair as Shiro expertly pops the cork and pours two glasses. “I'm not – _Shiro_ ,” he is flustered when Shiro pushes one of the glasses into his hand, “I'm not twenty one yet.”

Shiro regards him thoughtfully, tilting his own glass enough to let more of the bubbles race to the surface. “Well, _I'm_ not going to tell anyone. But exercise your free will as you like, please.”

Keith looks down at his glass for a moment, watches the amber liquid sparkle with the force of its carbonation. Then he reaches out and Shiro meets him halfway, clinking their glasses together. The taste is surprisingly smooth – a little dark, but it doesn't burn, even for a first time drinker. He smiles secretly against the rim of his glass.

Then he says, “Are you going to be alright, if I move?”

“Am I –” Shiro huffs a grating sound that Keith has come to learn is his laugh, all rusted around the edges like he's choking on the noise. “I've done just fine for many years before you came along, Kid.”

“Don't start that old man crap with me,” Keith says. He is smiling again.

“Back in _my_ day –”

“ _Alright_ , alright.” Quieter, full and dark in a soft way, Keith adds, “Thank you.”

Shiro finishes his glass, then pours himself another. “Don't go that far, now. Just promise me you'll do terrible, reckless things once you get there.”

“No guarantees. Free will, y'know.”

Shiro laughs again, gentler. “Oh yes. I certainly know.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh ariana, we're really in it now. 
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com 
> 
> playlist selection // [extraordinary machine.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQk0xTwZumo)


	4. deuteronomy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you'd think all this hard work would come with a promotion. (in which we sacrifice the accuracy of history's timeline for the sake of telling our story.)

Many people with many different motivations have debated the idea of destiny. Some call it fate, some call it predestination (though it's rare to find a Calvinist these days), and some call it ineffable. The last lot are the ones who know enough to know that you can't, or shouldn't, know things like the design of this world and whether or not it is traveling on a path that's been set from the start. These sorts also go by many different names: Angels, first and foremost. The Faithful, that's another. The Often-Spending-An-Afternoon-Downing-Enough-Single-Malt-Scotch-to-Not-Think-On-These-Matters. Miscellaneous fencesitters.

Ineffable, as a word, often serves as an excellent placeholder among circles that cannot quite grasp onto what it implies. Which is understandable; if we are looking at humankind (as we often are), there is a single quality that shapes the entire experience of every individual life at every turn: finiteness. The intrinsic condition of humanity is that it begins, and then after a while it ends, and there is nothing that can (or, possibly, should) be done about this. Humans experience an array of feelings, encounter a number of changes, and they do it all under the inevitable terms (regardless of whether they acknowledge them) that one day they will no longer feel, no longer change, and no longer be.

It should really come as no surprise that under these conditions, the topic of fate is such a personal and universal one. That it has shaped faith or un-faith or non-theistic-faith across the six millennia of human existence, that it is seated at the heart of so many philosophies (professional or otherwise). _Ineffable_ , some humans say, and when they say it they mean that they revere the path of faith as a mark of some divine grace of some fast-held denomination. _Ineffable_ , some humans say, and when they say it they mean they have studied books and stories and history and cannot understand what fate would look like, if it could look like anything at all. _Ineffable_ , some humans say, and when they say it they mean that they're not going to think about it.

Ineffable, in its strictest definition, means something too great and too vast to be known. To Adam, it has mostly just been part of the job description.

It is true that many of the esoterically philosophical aspects of Adam's job have always remained shrouded in mystery, particularly in the early days when the Earth was newly formed and all that. But Adam is, and always has been, clever. You can even call him intelligent. If he did not know the grand scheme of his mission, he could at least figure out the more mundane aspects of it – perhaps the larger details weren't for him to know in the first place. Figuring that She would have told him otherwise, Adam decided, a long, long time ago, to take what he knew of what Heaven deemed acceptable, and just do that.

To the best of his knowledge, that has worked so far.

What that means is that Adam has never encountered anything to tell him that it hasn't been. On the contrary, his occasional interactions with the head office (known by many names: the Great Beyond, the Seat of Divinity, Upstairs, etc) have been nothing short of perfunctory. The messages he has received have been bland acknowledgements ( _we have received word of the eventual canonization of one priest in your designated work area_ ), or quiet directives to turn his attention to particular situations ( _please make sure to keep an eye on the revolutions in Europe this Spring_ ). On the occasions that he must meet with the head office in person, the conversation has remained limited to a brief report, an approving nod, and vague plans for another check in in a century or two.

All of it by Adam's design.

Whether by virtue of the fact that he is merely an adequate emissary of the Lord, or because he has long ago recognized that less fuss makes for an infinitely easier eternal existence on Earth, who can say? (Adam, could, maybe. But he hasn't.) The important detail in all of this is that for about six millennia at his job post, Adam has been entirely competent at what he's been doing, and the head office has responded in kind by not seeming to notice much of anything that has transpired on Earth beyond what Adam has told them.

Most of his time, then, is not occupied with meeting with the crew Upstairs. It's understandable; Adam has been on Earth for a long time. He has spent over six thousand years living among humans, and humans are wont to fill their days with _things_. Things to do, to see, to experience, to own and give and eat and make. From the moment they began, humans created events out of every moment of every day, and really, how long can any being (divine or otherwise) withstand remaining truly ostracized from their eternally-assigned environment?

It had started in bits and pieces. (That is almost always how things start.) In the beginning, he had watched. That was the only tangible directive he had had, and so that was what he had done. He had watched the descendants of humanity's first spark do as they would: starting in small numbers, they had spent some time surviving. Then they had added onto survival more things. Things like words and art. Letters. Numbers. Communities, families. Ceremonies and celebrations. They bonded with animals and grew food. They built places to live and found leaders from their populations.

About a hundred years after the humans were up and running, Saephis had found Adam on one of the tall hills overlooking the river that would come to be named Euphrates. Adam hadn't objected to his presence, so Saephis had settled beside him at a distance and peered at him as though, if he looked close enough, he might be able to see what Adam was poring over.

He can't, though, so he has to ask.

“What do you have there?”

Adam makes a noise in the back of his throat, an acknowledging little hum, and then replies, “The humans have transcribed their language.”

“They – you mean, what they speak?”

“Apparently. The symbols match their words, or their ideas.”

Saephis is still looking in the vicinity of Adam's arms, where he is clutching the sheet made from reeds, even though it has become clear that Adam is not going to share what he is seeing. The corner of his lips flutter but the rest of his expression is composed.

“How clever,” he settles on, then lets his sunless eyes cast over the river stretching out below them. “What does it say?”

“Oh no, I don't think I'll be going that far.” Even when he admonishes him, Adam's voice never quite grows sharp. It is careful and even and soft. “I won't be tempted into acting your foothold on this Earth.”

Adam is still looking at his sheets. He does not see the way that Saephis is still and quiet as he sits, looking at the world around them without really looking at anything. (Though, in Adam's defense, language is an incredibly interesting and revolutionary invention. And he likely wouldn't be able to gauge what Saephis' attention had been on anyway.)

“Well,” Saephis replies after a few moments of silence, “You wouldn't be a very good angel if you were tempted so easily, I suppose.”

“And you wouldn't be a very good demon if you didn't give it your best effort.”

Saephis makes a noise of his own, like old bones or dead leaves, muted and grating. It is a laugh.

In the coming years, the humans continue to grow. They are never content to be as they are, but it is not Adam's place to judge them for that. In fact, it is more Adam's place to Love than anything else; to remain, at all times, full of Heaven's Grace, its ever placid Love that blankets everything it touches. The city of Jericho rises, the kingdoms of Sumer and Egypt. Idols are erected and worshipped and Adam is not quite sure to feel about that; in the end, it's easier to call it _ineffable_ and chalk it up to that divine plan of Hers.

Once, wandering the streets of Egypt, he finds Saephis with one of the domesticated animals.

“Cats,” Saephis tells him, stroking two fingers down the things head. It makes a noise, a low rumbling that Adam can't quite place. “They're called cats.”

“Aren't you at all worried about being so close to the thing?”

“Weren't _you_ partially responsible for humans bonding with animals in the first place? Surely you know more about domestication than I.”

Adam sighs. “I merely sowed a few seeds of love for all things living. The humans took that and ran with it.”

Saephis looks up from where he's been staring at the animal, the cat, and his normally soberly held lips quirk into a smile. “You don't like them.”

“Humans? No, I Love them.”

“Cats. _Animals_.” Of course Saephis would not fall for Adam's play at obliviousness. (Even hereditary enemies will come to know each other, to some degree, after coexisting together on a single planet for a thousand years.)

Adam glances at Saephis, and then away. “Animals, too.”

Saephis nearly smiles. “Well. You've always been a very good angel.”

(Adam nearly smiles, too.)

The cat seems content enough to remain across Saephis' shoulders and against the back of his neck, even as they walk. Adam glances at it once, then again, then looks more broadly at it as it continues to make that noise in the back of its throat and in its chest. The low, strange rumbling. It grows deeper when Saephis runs his fingers across its head.

“What's it making that sound for?” Adam asks mildly. Saephis cants his head.

“Purring, that's what they call it. Supposedly, that means she's pleased.”

“– Pleased?” Adam leans in, brow furrowed in curiosity. “How do they know that? _Can_ cats be pleased?”

“I've no idea.” The cat opens its little mouth and suddenly that little mouth is much, much larger – even as it yawns, its long pointed teeth gleam in the sunlight. Adam shivers a little, but Saephis seems unfazed by the whole affair. “But she hasn't moved, so I assume that, at the very least, it might mean she's content enough. Happy.”

“Hm.” _Happy_. There is something in Adam, something where his Divine Grace lives, that is pleased by the notion of happiness. It settles comfortably against that stagnant, holy Love that he possesses by the generosity of Her mercy, as if it is one more tally in the column of things that prove the power and righteousness of the Almighty. He looks up, looks at the expression on Saephis' face – normally so somber now soft under the dappled sunlight, blurring the edges of the shadows as he keeps his attention on the black cat draped over his shoulders. That does _not_ settle easily against the reservoir of Divine Love within him. The sight of the demon's expression ripples, strange and foreign and for a moment, fear sparks up through his chest like so much ice in the winter.

Then Saephis steps away as the road they are on broadens. Oh. Adam had not realize how close they'd drawn.

“Ah, well.” Adam clears his throat and takes his own step in the other direction. “I must be off. I heard talk of violence to the west. Have to see if the rage can be quelled.”

Saephis nods, raising a hand. “I'm off to see about deposing a king.”

“Which will – what, cause chaos?”

“We can't rule out the possibility. Maybe if you finish quick enough, you can thwart my wiles.”

Adam's voice catches in his throat. In the end, there is a little more love and a little less stability in this region of the world, but it is not so much different than what the humans accomplish on their own.

That is the way of humans, Adam learns over the years that follow. Their growth, after a while, seems to be something inevitable – whether or not it is predestined, they do all things with the same kind of drive, of force, that wars are waged with. Learning and inventing, building larger cities, discovering new ways of keeping themselves fed and sheltered and entertained. Creating identities for themselves – befriending animals and waging wars. Adam had been told to watch and what he sees is that blessing or wiles, good and bad, often act like stones in a pond. Sometimes the ripples rocket across the surface, sometimes they bubble up and fade away in the same breath, but they always end at some point under the force of human desire and human will.

Eventually, Adam decides to open a book shop.

The storefront has been vacant on a corner of the city for a few months, and the day that Adam realizes his apartment has no more room for _himself_ anymore, given the number of volumes he has on the shelves (and on the floor, under and on the bed, in the kitchen cupboards) he decides something should be done about that. So he buys the place, and the building above it. His thinking on that had been practical – it makes no sense to own a store as well as an apartment twenty blocks away. Besides, downtown there's a view of the river and, from the top floor, the bay. (In all honesty, he won't ever grow concerned about real estate values. Money means little to angels in general, though it would probably mean little to anyone who had lived for almost six thousand years and could either accumulate as much as they liked or simply will into being the reality they desired.)

(Let it be known, because this is a detail that is important to Adam, that he _did_ earn his money over the years. He was never one to be so flippant with the use of his miraculous magic. Otherwise that makes it – well. Less miraculous, for one.)

Church Street Books opened in October of 1809, and Adam's personal collection made for most of its initial stock. Initially, his sales had been small – a few volumes he had been less attached to would be sold every so often, but for the most part he kept to himself and blended in with the milieu of the city. A few months in, Shiro visits. A stray cat follows him.

“Isn't the name a little on the nose?” He asks, offhandedly adjusting his cravat and leaning against a railing in the middle of the store. Adam, sorting some new inventory, sighs without looking up.

“It's the street I'm on, Takashi. Nothing more.”

“I like how you think I haven't figured out your sense of humor in the last six millennia.”

Adam doesn't say anything to that for a moment. He is looking at a set of atlases – beautiful, but he has the same set himself and he annotated those. The new ones are placed on a shelf by the front. Then, finally, he murmurs demurely, “Angels aren't known for their humor, you know.”

“Oh yes,” Shiro replies, idly picking up a copy of _Northanger Abbey_. “I'm well aware.”

Turning, Adam attempts to shoot Shiro a stern look, but Shiro is conveniently consumed by reading the first page of the book in his hands. So, of course, Adam must settle on sighing instead and saying, “Be careful with that thing in the shop, please.”

Shiro glances down at the cat, who has decided to sit almost on top of his foot. “She's not mine.”

“She followed you in, so you're responsible for her.”

“Responsible? Me? But _what_ will that do to my reputation?”

“I thought they gave you a commendation, Downstairs. Don't see how your reputation is in any danger.”

“Ah, yes.” There's the ghost of a laugh wrapped up in his words, that breath over bare bones. “The Crusades.”

“Oh?” Adam glances back up at Shiro and, finally, catches his gaze. “That was you?”

Shiro shrugs, then drops to give the little cat a scratch on the top of her head. “As far as they know. Not my fault that humans are so good at doing my job for me.”

“Well, at least you're keeping up with the Big Seven. Sloth gets so little attention, really.” Adam watches as Shiro straightens up. “So you like them? Cats?”

It's strange that it – doesn't _feel_ strange. It _hasn't_ felt strange, in many millennia, to entertain the notion that Shiro experiences something along the lines of humans in liking and disliking what he will – something along the lines of, well, Adam. Superficially, of course. Of course. But he has learned, along the way, that Shiro has preferences in alcohol and entertainment and cities. (Paris, he has said, is nothing that it's cracked up to be. Their coffee is passable at best, but their tea is nothing like what you can get in China or Japan. In fact, his favorite of the cities is in Japan, isn't it?)

Looking down at the cat, Shiro tilts his head thoughtfully. His lips do the thing where they pull, momentarily, to the side. “They're interesting,” he says lightly. “They don't seem adversely affected by my very presence on this earth like some of the other animals.” Glancing back up, the contemplative look on Shiro's face is replaced by a wolfish grin that has Adam remembering himself and huffing. “Must be proof that they're secretly very terrible. Maybe that's why they flocked to witches.”

“Oh, _honestly_.” Adam snaps one last atlas shut and places it with the rest. “I still think that's all nonsense. Where would human magic even come from?”

“Could be part of that whole ineffable thing.” Shiro's voice is crisp and good-humored, and before Adam can reply he's cutting him off. “What do you say to lunch? I could go for a Guinness. And something to chase it.”

They do get lunch that day, but not on others. Sometimes it is Adam who declines, stiffly and quickly sporting a pinched expression. Sometimes it is Shiro, quiet and thin and terse. Sometimes they drift for a few years, carefully avoiding each other. As time goes on, Adam develops tastes for things – he likes coffee and tea both, but really hangs his hat on espresso. When he can, he'll brush his hand against the barista's and infuse in them a little of the Kindness that lives like a great, golden thing in his chest. He likes plays, but prefers nights in reading. When children stop by the shop, he takes time to sit by them and teach them some of the more complicated words – or any of the words, if they can't read. When the centuries bleed into each other, he politely agrees to old-time patrons that, yes, he certainly is the spitting image of his father, isn't he?

(That's not really a lie; he, like everyone, is made in the Eternal Image and Likeness of the World's Universal Father. Or whatever name She is going by.)

(At least, that's what the scriptures say. And the motivational posters on the walls Upstairs.)

He meets with Shiro, or doesn't. He runs his shop. He goes to plays, or the movies when they come around. Occasionally, he'll hunt down some rare manuscript overseas and sow a little Love where he can. And, of course, he checks in with the head office every so often.

A little bit before the world is meant to end, Adam makes his usual pilgrimage Upstairs. There are, of course, many ways to get into heaven. Adam elects walking through the front door, which means making his way to the Old City Hall Station and alighting up the stairs to the door that humans never quite seem to see. (They're good about that, ignoring the things that need to be ignored. They're not quite so good at not ignoring the things that need their attention, but Adam has seen a lot of balance over the last six thousand years. This isn't so different.)

Immediately, the stone of the city's former glory fades away. Everything around him is bright in a way that needs no external lighting; Adam shields his eyes until they grow used to the searing, white and slightly-off-white vibrance that is heaven's main office. Or, specifically, the escalator that will take him up to heaven's main office. Best to adjust now where no one will see – he likes to think (firmly, resolutely, a little fearfully) that this need to adjust to heaven's light is merely a consequence of living so long Earth.

When he gets to the top, Adam has adjusted. Gabriel is waiting.

Of course.

“Hello, Gabriel,” Adam greets him, placing a hand over where his heart is, in this human body. Gabriel smiles Benevolently, nodding. (Adam has noticed, but never said, that it might be more effective if Gabriel's Benevolent smile reached his eyes. It's not Adam's place, is it? To correct an archangel? Besides, it's not as if heaven has any need of the nuances of human emotion.)

(He's needed to remind himself of this on more trips than not, the past three hundred years.)

“Welcome home.” Gabriel stands perfectly tall, hands clasped primly in front of himself. Adam feels himself attempting to stand straighter – wonders, idly, when he'd begun to slouch. “How has business been on Earth?”

“Oh, well it's –” He stumbles for a moment, which is blindingly unacceptable. At his lips had been something about the bookstore, something that has no place _here_ , in the aching vibrancy of heaven. Of – home. He clears his throat, and pretends not to notice the flicker of some emotion across Gabriel's face. “– It's going well. In the past fifty years I've manged to visit most of Europe and Asia, and plan on visiting Africa this year. To help with the recent food shortages.”

“Ah, yes. Good.” Gabriel glances away, everything in his posture firm and tense and Divinely good-natured. “Following the example of loaves and fishes, then.”

“Y – well, in the spirit of things,” Adam replies, haltingly. “Nothing so grand as – what Our Lord can do.”

Gabriel looks back at him, and Adam feels himself trying to stand even taller and stiffer than he had been. Silence blooms between them for a moment. Then, “Yes. Of course.”

Adam releases a breath.

Then Gabriel turns. Behind him is a globe larger than both of them put together, magnificently detailed and glowing, faintly, with the same energy as the floor, the walls, the wide, empty hallways. “Ariel.”

No one Upstairs has ever called him anything other than his Given Name, the one bestowed by Her, but it has become increasingly difficult in the last thousand or so years not to startle, a little, at being called it. The longer he remains stationed on Earth, he supposes, the more he is used to the name he has adopted. Adam stiffens again, trying to keep the question in his voice as muted as possible when he asks, “Yes?”

“You might be hearing – rumors. Soon.”

“Rumors?”

“ _Yes_.” Gabriel's voice is thin when he snaps his reply. Adam closes his mouth. “Rumors. Whispers of things to come – disasters. Catastrophes. War, and the like. Building more quickly, across more of the world. Things that seem – anathema to Divine Love. Adversarial to it.”

Adam's breath catches in his throat, but he waits until Gabriel has finished and then a few moments of silence more before he replies, cautiously, “Anything – _adversarial_ to our heavenly cause will be something I am dedicated to thwarting.”

Gabriel turns back, slowly, but to Adam's momentary relief some of the tension has gone from his expression. His smile, as always, remains beatific. “Of course, Ariel. You are Her chosen representative on the world below, in Her infinite wisdom. But, I need you to understand something.” He takes a step closer, closing the distance between them while still remaining enough space to grant both of them a personal bubble. Adam forces his breathing to slow. “These will be on a scale that you have never seen before and when you – fail your duty, so to speak, and allow them to consume the world below, you will be Forgiven.”

(The momentary relief has long dissolved in a flood of ice from Adam's human-looking heart.)

Adam can't form the words. He looks at Gabriel's benign, pointed expression, trying to fathom what he is implying and coming up with absolutely nothing to explain it. “I – I would never _falter_ in what I've been – assigned, Gabriel.”

“No, _no_ of course not.” He steps back again, losing some of the interest in his expression. (Adam knows from experience that this means the conversation is very close to over. Non-negotiably.) “You and I are both loyal to the Great Plan, after all. So if you were to fail in quelling the destruction of the Earth – well. You have done your best for a very long time, Ariel. And perhaps this is how things are meant to end. In the – well, in the _end_.”

Adam loses the thread of whatever he could reply. But it doesn't seem to matter; Gabriel has already turned raising one hand in an awkward farewell. “Thank you for delivering your report. Best of luck in the end times, Ariel.”

Then Gabriel is gone – walking back down one of the endless hallways. Reflexively, Adam presses one hand to his chest. It is shaking. It shakes as he takes a step backwards and turns on his heel, and it shakes as he takes the escalator back down.

Shiro's warning comes back to him, fully and all at once, and Adam is seized with the urge to yell loudly for a very, very long time. Once he safely through the door in the Old City Hall Station, he leans against it and allows his head to drop.

 _Fuck_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of ominous, isn't it? / comments are love. 
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com 
> 
> playlist selection // [9 to 5 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4OzdyxbOuU)


	5. judges.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> everyone starts to get on the same page, with a little turbulence.

“Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Actually I usually have a _really_ good idea of what I'm talking about. It's suspicious.”

“How – in _what_ world – there has literally never been anyone less suspicious in the entire world –”

“Actually,” Pidge says mildly, interrupting the hushed, heated argument mounting between Lance and Hunk, “It's at least a little suspicious.”

Hunk, looking pleased at the validation, sits back in his chair. “See? What'd I tell you.”

Lance, looking _far_ less pleased at the route the conversation has taken, leans further over the pile of books sprawled across the table until he's half on top of it himself. Jabbing one finger in Hunk's face, then gesturing wildly towards Pidge, he says, “So what, we're going to listen to the guy who was trying to find aliens every night? Like _that's_ not suspicious?”

“That's why I'm inclined to believe him,” Hunk says while Pidge, at the same time, corrects mildly, “Not just aliens.”

Lance levels them both with a look (it is less scathing than he likes to believe; it's more disheveled and bewildered than pointed) and then collapses back in his seat. In doing so he winds up swinging the other way entirely, sliding down until he's more hanging off the thing instead of sitting in it, arms crossed tightly against his chest. Hunk sits up a little to be able to see that the hasn't landed on the floor entirely. Pidge goes back to reading.

Across the library, the young woman in question continues typing, blissfully unaware that she happens to be the focus of a heated debate twenty feet away.

The young woman in question, of course, is Allura. Lance did not know this – in fact, he had not learned her name just yet. He had seen her, for the first time, in his Introduction to Macroeconomics class, and had not been able to stop thinking about her ever since. In the margins of his notebook he had doodled the back of her head (all he could see from the seat he had picked) though he hadn't been able to do justice to her silver-white hair. (Though, to be fair, it's hard to translate an ethereal glow when you're working with a mechanical pencil you'd stolen from your best friend a week ago.)

In fact, the only conversation they had shared had been after their first shared class together had ended. While Lance would _prefer_ that his ability to act upon his emotions – romantic or otherwise – is something that he's particularly skilled in, that he can translate thought to action to result in the seamles way the scenes play out in his mind, Lance's attempt to talk to the girl in his class with the hair that catches the sunlight and an accent from abroad is far more indicative of how such endeavors usually play out for him.

A case study, then. Lance had kept his gaze trained on Allura through the last ten minutes of the session, and through the next five as she sat, transfixedly reading something on her computer. Lance, through careful, meticulous planning, packed his bag as slowly and painstakingly as possible. This, of course, resulted in a reminder from the TA to move faster, if he wants to make it to his next class in time, and accidentally trying to pack away his deskmate's laptop in the midst of his mindless motions. Explaining _that_ away just barely saved him from a broken nose, and in the interim he hadn't seen Allura leave. So, naturally, he swung his bag onto his shoulder, almost spilling its contents, then jumped over the row of desks, bashed his shoulder into the row opposite, and windmilled his way out of the classroom. (It's very likely that he lost the mechanical pencil in the shuffle; it's hard to keep track of the minutiae when there are important things on the line, like true love and all that.)

The real problem was how to act as if he _hadn't_ run down the length of Morris Hall's main hallway just to catch up with Allura. The solution had involved a few creative shortcuts, including another classroom's backdoor, all for Lance to be leaning against the wall when Allura rounded the corner by the stairs.

“Hey –” He'd said, only for Allura to make her way past him without noticing, her eyes fixed on her phone. Lance had stared after her for a few long moments, then took the stairs two at a time trailing after her.

“Hey!” He'd called and this time, Allura looked up. Blinking at him for a moment, she nodded as if she wasn't quite sure what was called for in this situation then, bit by careful bit, went back to her phone.

Then, in the moment that Lance considered disappearing into the aether right there on the stairs, Allura looked back up.

“Have you noticed anything strange on this campus?” She asked, stiff and serious. Lance stared at her.

“Uh – ?”

“Shifts in energy. The weather. Anything that cannot be explained through the means of conventional physics.”

A detail that Lance does _not_ hold dear is the fact that he'd passed high school physics by the skin of his teeth; he wasn't a _bad_ student, he just hadn't clicked with physics in the way he had with chemistry and psychology. So he wasn't very equipped to answer her in the way that maybe she wanted. What he _could_ do, though, was try his luck again.

Breath finally caught, he leaned against the stair railing and attempted to make all the angles of his posture align with the utmost fluidity. Then he said, “Well if you wanted, we could always explore together.”

Allura looked at him, long and impassive, for a full five seconds. Then she replied, “No thank you.” And added, turning back around and back to her phone, “I don't believe you're supposed to run through the hallways.”

A week later, they have not exchanged any more words and Lance has roped Hunk into helping him weather the throes of his heartbreak. Pidge, unfortunately, had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Namely, anywhere near Lance or Hunk. (In her defense, Lance had not given up his quest to bond as roommates and Hunk had not given up _his_ quest to go over her data himself. So she hadn't really stood a chance to lose them in the first place.)

Now, once Hunk has ascertained that Lance is only draped dramatically over the chair and hasn't concussed himself by falling off of it, he is back to trying to look over Pidge's shoulder. And Pidge has gone back to curling around her book and her scrawled-over legal pad so as to not allow Hunk to see over her shoulder.

“It's _not_ suspicious,” Lance moans. “It's just – oh _I_ don't know. She's not from here! She's probably just – curious or something. Or maybe that's how they do things in England or whatever.”

“She's from England?” Hunk asks idly, lowering down to try a different angle to see Pidge's notes. (It doesn't work.)

“I mean, probably? She's got the accent.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“Hunk,” Pidge says thinly, “You should quit while you're already behind. It's not going to happen.”

“Pidge come _on_. I'm not just an engineer. Astrophysics is like, my _jam_.”

“You guys aren't paying attention to the _important things_.” Lance sits up, only to fold his arms on the table and drop his chin onto them. Hunk glances up, and Pidge breathes a sigh of relief at his attention focusing elsewhere.

“Important things, like...?”

“Uh, like my _life_ being _ruined_.”

Hunk's lips flutter up at the corner but, to his credit, he keeps the smile mostly off his expression as he reaches over and places a hand on Lance's shoulder. “ _Aw_ , buddy.”

Over her notes, Pidge snorts. Lance ignores her.

“Alright, c'mon.” Hunk pushes back his chair and stands up, keeping his hand on Lance's shoulder all the while. “You're _clearly_ not going to study today, and the STEM frat is hosting an ice cream social. Which means socializing! And ice cream! All for free. You're _not_ gonna say no to that.”

Lance rolls his head enough to glare up at Hunk, then lets his legs sprawl out in clear defiance of Hunk's attempt to get a good time going. Hunk only sighs. (Perhaps it's not important to know in the long run, but as a point of clarification, Hunk has known Lance for twelve years, and for humans, particularly humans at the age of eighteen, this means something significant. At least, it was significant to Hunk, and to Lance when he wasn't caught in the tides of his own misery. Beyond the emotional implications of knowing someone for the better part of your life and almost all of your living memory, this also means that Hunk has seen Lance's life be, as he calls it, _totally ruined_ at least fourteen times before. It is the unfortunate side effect of feeling a lot, constantly.)

(But, of course, Hunk would never ask Lance to change who he is. And Lance would never ask the same of him.)

Hunk knows to wait through this particular rainstorm of Lance's, and Lance obliges by trying to get the rainstorm to pass as quickly as it can. It involves a few more minutes of moaning, and Hunk passing the time by using his height to get yet another angle on Pidge's notes. And it involves Pidge seriously contemplating working under the table until they leave. (What she is denying is the knowledge that Lance will, of course, drag her to the STEM social with them. She's smart enough to have figured out their patterns within a day of talking to them properly; still, a young girl with secrets to hide can dream, can't she?)

Slowly, as if impossibly made of lead, Lance stands. Morosely, as if very possibly making it seem like he is made of lead an cannot possibly go on, Lance starts packing up his books. Caught up in the drama of it all, he doesn't think to look behind him, at the space between the table and the nearest shelf of books. And, as these things usually go, he winds up whacking his bag into something decidedly solid.

He turns on his heel at the same time the guy he just hit has rebalanced himself, rubbing one hand against his side and balefully shooting a glare Lance's way.

“– Seriously?” Lance says first, quickly, the word turning sharp as it's spoken. The guy raises an eyebrow.

“What do you mean, seriously?”

“I _mean_ ,” Lance gestures “You were just like – _creepin_ '. Right there, where I was trying to be.”

“You –” The guy cuts himself off glancing first at Lance, then at Hunk who makes the most apologetic face he can manage. (It's quite good. He's had a lot of practice.) Receiving no tangible help, he makes a noise in the back of his throat and points at the shelf he'd been browsing. “There's a _shelf_.”

“And?”

“And? Are you _kidding_ me – look.” Running a hand through his hair then scrubbing it across his face, he sighs, short and sharp. “I don't have time for this. I have something to look for, so if you could move –”

“No way!” Lance has drawn himself up to his full height, and though it's only an inch or so above the other guy's, he uses it to his full advantage, chest puffed and jaw set. “What, were you listening in or something? Spying?”

“Spy – _spying_? What the hell would I be _spying_ on, I don't even know you!”

“Then why were you so close to our table, huh?”

“Because the shelf is _right there_ – and _you_ hit _me_!”

“A _likely_ story.”

“It literally happened fifteen seconds ago!”

“And why _this_ shelf? Betcha can't answer that!”

“It's where the atlases are! I need the one from 1991.”

Pidge, who had been thoroughly buried in her work, shakes her head without looking up. “In use,” she says neutrally. “And will be for a while.”

“1991?”

This voice is a new one, and it has the strange and singular effect of freezing Lance in his tracks, all the misplaced misery quelling in an instant. Hunk blinks in astonishment, but he's already put the pieces together before he turns and sees the sight of the subject of Lance's life's ruination. Allura, for her part, seems to be entirely unfazed by the argument between Lance and the person we know to be Keith. Instead, she is glancing down at Pidge, her expression far softer and more curious that it had been in Lance's one and only meeting with her.

“Is that what you're reading at the moment? The 1991 volume?”

Glancing up, Pidge seems struck by Allura's energy. (The squabbles of boys are easy to ignore; there is nothing quite so uninteresting as watching boys try and fail to come into their own in all the ways that don't matter much. She had been lucky in her life, so far, as to avoid many of these rituals – her brother had been exceptionally tolerable as a human being. But there is a striking difference between plays at understanding the world and the kind of curious, open confidence that Allura exudes, and this is why Pidge is not entirely equipped to drown her out the way she can her roommates-by-circumstance and a random-library-bystander.)

“Uh, yeah,” she settles on. “I'm reading it.”

“Would you mind my borrowing it once you're finished? Or –” Allura curls her fingers into the hem of her shirt, as if she is unsure how to stand and do and be among a group of so many, then remembers herself and smooths the fabric down. “– If it's not terribly important, if I might have a look –”

“No way.” That, at least, is easier for Pidge. (Her details, her secrets, are more important than her lack of socialization and her distaste for distracting antics.) Allura's brow furrows, but that is when Keith pushes past Lance (earning a squawk) and leans over the desk.

“Hey. I need that one too.”

“Ugh. Seriously?” Pidge curls tighter around her book and her notes and shoots Keith the most disinterested look she can manage. (One day, it will be very good. For now, it is a work in practice.) “ _No_.”

“See?” Lance finds his voice once more and pushes Keith in return, attempting to oust him from the table. (He is unsuccessful.) “He said _no_. So take your stupid mullet and get out of here. I believe the lady among us has first dibs anyway.”

“What, no she _doesn't_ –” Pidge begins to argue, though she is quickly drowned out by Hunk seizing an opportunity and settling back in his seat, leaning in close.

“Come _on_ , come on. Maybe they're looking for the same stuff you're looking for.”

“They _aren't_ –”

“And aren't four heads better than one?”

“Not necessarily –”

“Yes necessarily! Especially when everyone's specializations are different. _You_ have the coding, I have the engineering. We both have the astrophysics. Uh –” Hunk gestures (politely, thanks very much) to Allura.

Catching on, she introduces herself. “Allura.”

“Allura has – uh...”

“ _Oh_ , well. At least a few things, though I was hoping to study some history –” 

“History! Got it, thanks. And, uh –?”

“Keith,” says Keith.

“Keith's got – ?”

“None of your business.”

“Well, Keith's got something! Pidge, _c'mon_.”

Hunk is vastly blessed in talent and passion, but another one of his blessings – one that is as revered as it is feared by those who know of it (Lance, mostly) – is his puppy dog eyes. They are, as far as persuading looks go, one of the most effective in his age range and on either coast. For all intents and purposes, they _easily_ surpass the talents and abilities of everyone currently gathered.

None of them stand a chance.

This is how Lance finds out, in a group study session late on a Friday afternoon that he in no way signed up for and isn't quite sure how he got himself involved in at all, that the girl of his dreams is a _cryptid hunter_.

 

* * *

 

Five days ago, Shiro had asked Adam to keep an eye for anything suspicious. Today, Adam is sitting in Foley Square after having just heard, from Gabriel himself, that Earth's destruction is nigh imminent.

Chatter, indeed.

Perhaps this is the best point to start understanding a few more things about Adam, and possibly about Shiro as well. Some details are more obvious than the rest: he is profoundly happy with his bookshop, though he won't say proud because there is always more work to be done in the name of perfection, and pride is not a sin he ever feels like committing. He prefers French food, on the whole, because its richness is managed by small portions and it has a way of balancing sweet and savory in a way that leaves him craving neither when he is finished. However, he is also very fond of sushi, which he normally shares with Shiro. He believes that Shiro drives too fast, though in general he prefers walking. Deep within his heart, he might say that he prefers flying, but he'd never give voice to that. Flying is not part of his assignment, and he has tried, very hard, to adhere to his position over the years.

That is probably the more important detail at the current moment. For six thousand years, Adam has done what he can to abide by the parameters of his job and his very existence as an angel. About a thousand years ago, though, he'd struck an accord with Shiro: they would, for the most part, keep their attempts and angelic and demonic interference separate from each other. Adam would not attempt to directly thwart Shiro's wiles, and in turn, Shiro would keep his corruption away from whatever sector Adam had been working with.

At the time, Adam had realized that making a deal with the devil (or, at least, the Devil's representative on this Earth) hadn't felt – particularly devilish.

It was not the first time Adam had forgotten to Feel, in his divine soul, _what_ Shiro was – to viscerally experience the line in the sand that divided them, the hellfire between their ideologies and their masters. It was not the first time that, for a moment, Shiro had just been _Shiro_ and Adam had just been _Adam_ , and that is Unforgivable. In the biblical sense. That is anathema to the very _reason_ they exist.

Upstairs does not look very kindly on disobedience. And Adam has a suspicion that even if Downstairs has been known, in the past, to be emblematic of rebellion in its purest form, that is probably not the case these days. Not if they, too, require memos and visits and everything that Adam does for his own work.

 _They are who are_. They cannot change that fact.

And Adam cannot entertain the idea of _changing anything_.

Belatedly, Adam realizes that he has been digging his nails into the flesh of his palm. He releases his grip on himself, and studies the half moon impressions in the soft afternoon sun. They are small and quiet, little dents that look surprisingly, achingly, human, and Adam despises them as much as he is thrilled by the similarities, and terrified of the whole thing. Minutely, his fingers are still trembling, Gabriel's curt and disinterested voice playing on a loop in the back of his mind.

The world is ending. The world is _ending_ , and Gabriel had said it with the same disaffected, clinical voice he used every hundred years, to comment on Adam's handiwork. On the Earth that is about to be no more.

Adam stands abruptly from the bench. There is only one place that he can go, isn't there?

 

* * *

 

Leophis & Co. is about as far uptown as Church Street Books is downtown. Nestled on a block in the upper hundreds, it has existed for, perhaps, a few years less than Church Street Books, but it is as much fixed into the fabric of its own neighborhood. Adam is not surprised to find himself the day's only customer; when the bell chimes softly at the door and the motion of it kicks up eddies of dust that glitter in the late afternoon sun, Adam isn't concerned that they will be interrupted. He is sure, miraculously, they will find just enough time to – to –

He's still not sure.

But he cuts through rows of records with the stride of someone who is.

He doesn't bother with the counter. He also doesn't doubt that he will find who he is looking for, where he is looking. This, at least, Adam can be sure of: when he raps a hand against the door of the back room, he doesn't wait for an answer before pushing it open.

Shiro greets him by glancing at him upside-down, head hanging over the armrest of the couch (purchased in 1907, still in very good condition; they just don't make them like they used to, apparently).

“I've been Visited,” Shiro says, with a bitter humor, thin and dry. Adam sighs.

“Look, I –”

Shiro does not interrupt him. In fact, despite being upside-down, Shiro waits patiently for Adam to find himself, get his words in order. It's Adam who falls silent, gaze fixed on the darkness of Shiro's sunglasses, the set of his jaw, the way the dryness of his tone is written and concealed in the line of his lips. For a moment, just one, he tries to Feel for something – something dark and sharp edged. Something that bleeds an adder's venom and corrupts things from the roots. Something fearsome and dedicated to his destruction.

He'd Felt those things, once. Long ago – long before the Earth was the Earth and his home had been heaven. Long before, when a divide had torn the foundations of his home asunder and chaos had been born. He had _choked_ on them, the first time around. On the acrid taste of betrayal, on the way the sorrow had sliced through him at the sight, the knowledge, of seeing those he had called family Fall. The birth of pain.

In this back room, six thousand years after starting his watch on Earth, with Shiro looking on him, Adam can't Feel any of that. Adam can't Feel much of anything at all – nothing more than the currents of life that ebb and flow the same way they have for six millennia. He can't Feel anything but what his current home has been for almost the whole time he's known it.

He presses a hand to his face.

When Shiro speaks again, it's less edged. A little slower, a little more – careful. “So what's this, then? Need my face to help you work through some things?”

“I'm just – thinking.”

“Let me guess, they're upstanding and well representative of Divinity, hm?”

Adam lowers his hand enough to look up at Shiro from between his fingers, one eyebrow raised. The corner of his lips twitch upwards.

“That's always been your problem, you know,” Shiro says.

“What has?”

“Too much heaven on your mind.”

(Adam makes a noise that Shiro thinks is a little too amused for the look he shoots him. The contradiction feels like a small victory and those, of course, are always the best kind.)

(But it fades in the same breath that it is born. These kinds of things, the soft things that memories are built on, usually are.)

Shiro swings himself upward and forward so that he's sitting more properly on the couch. His expression settles back into something untouchable and unreadable. He spends the long moments of silence studying Adam, and Adam can almost feel the penetration of his gaze, the way it takes in his half covered expression, his fingers, his chest. The way he stands and holds himself – sweeping every inch of him in a way that Adam thinks, maybe, should make him uncomfortable. But this is nothing like Gabriel's scrutiny, the Lord's eternal watching over him. This is – it's Shiro.

And Shiro reads him instantly and entirely.

“You found something out.”

“Why would you presume –”

“Ah, yes. Because I'm an _idiot_. Because I don't know you after how many millennia –” Shiro cuts himself off, exhaling long and slow and low before he runs one hand through his hair. “Okay. Whatever. It's fine – even if you know something, it's fine. I'll just – figure something out. It's fine.”

“It's –”

“I get it, okay? Adam, I'm – I'm _not_ stupid.” Something breaks a little in Shiro's voice, the way ice yields to the river underneath. “ _We are who are_ , right? And that's _fine_ –”

“No, you're –”

“ _Seriously_.” There's warmth now, if Adam's hearing it right. Warmth in Shiro's voice. “Things don't have to change. Or they do – they can. Just let me know. We'll adjust. We'll keep on keeping on –”

“ _Takashi_.”

Shiro falls silent and looks up at him.

“It's Armageddon.”

Shiro remains silent. His lips part, but no words come. Not until full, long seconds pass. “The, uh. The – the big one?”

“ _No_ , a much _smaller_ one, contained to an easily defensible area – _yes the big one_.”

Shiro nods once, then again. Then he stands and walks away from Adam to the staircase in the back corner of the back room.

“What are you –”

“I think right now,” Shiro answers him before he manages to finish the question, “We are who _drink_.”

And Adam – well. He can't argue with that.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it was inevitable. or ineffable. which may or may not be the same thing. / comments are love. 
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com 
> 
> playlist selection(s) // [with a little help from my friends](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHjKxXMB4dE) & [sinnerman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH3Fx41Jpl4)


	6. ruth.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an angel and a demon walk into an apartment with a wet bar, and have a full conversation. pidge uncovers some secrets.

Shiro's apartment looks nothing like the store below.

It is not the first place that Shiro has lived, of course. After all, this country had not existed six thousand years ago, let alone this city block. But Adam has seen only a few of Shiro's residences over the years he realizes suddenly, and none in the last two hundred years at least. So it should be a strange thing, to climb up the stairs and cross the threshold to a place he's never seen before and find it all so familiar.

But then, it _is_ very _Shiro_.

Maybe a few millennia ago that would have been a strange thing to think, that Shiro has things that are distinctively him. That Adam, in fact, might have things that are the same – idiosyncratic and identifiable. But the moment he crosses through the door, there is no denying that is what Adam might imagine Shiro's uptown apartment to look like, if he were in the habit of imagining that. (Angels, as a whole, tend not to imagine much. In fact, demons are much the same – whether it is the fact that they are of the same stock, cut from the same cloth as it were – or it is occupational hazard picked up along the way, who's to say?)

(It should, by now, not come as much of a surprise that Adam's imagination is more robust than his peers'.)

The colors are dark but washed out, muted – more charcoal than black, more subdued burgundy and navy than red and blue, the flooring a gentle pine rather than a rich cherry wood or deep, aching mahogany. (That's what the flat in London had, some three hundred years ago, wasn't it? Everything cut from sharp angles and varnished impossibly dark.) And despite the palette, nothing looks particularly cluttered. The ceilings are high, the furniture (sleek, unassuming leather) placed politely against the walls. None of it is particularly ornamented – not the coffee table, not the wet bar in the corner, not what Adam can see of the kitchen to the back. That's where the windows must be, he realizes, streaming the golden sort of sunshine that comes with the afternoon in the city in latest summer, earliest fall, whatever you'd like to call it.

Shiro has already crossed the room entirely. Somewhere along the way he'd lost his leather jacket – still, despite the strain in his stride and the undiscussed news hanging between them, Adam spots it sitting properly on a hook on the far side of the living room. He waits, more to see what Shiro will do than worry over where and how to sit.

It takes a moment. Shiro paces the length of the room twice, running a hand through his hair, mixing the strands of white at the front with the black at the back. Adam watches him, watches the way his fingers work through the longer locks and only just barely brush against where he wears the sides shorn short. (The first time Adam had seen the cut – only about ten years ago or so, really nothing more than the length of a breath, the blink of an eye – he'd wondered aloud first at the why. _Keeping up with fashion is close to devilishness, isn't it?_ Shiro had answered. Which, for the record, it could be, given how cruel the fashion industry has always been to humans who didn't fall within very narrowly prescribed lines of acceptability. _It does all comes back to that colonialism_ , Adam had replied, and Shiro had sighed deep and long, and self consciously ran a hand through his hair in much the same way he does now.)

(That had been when Adam had wondered a second thing, not aloud. To himself, maybe in spite of himself, he had wondered what it felt like – the longer parts, the shorter parts buzzed close to his head. The difference in texture.)

(Then he'd promptly excused himself to perform a miracle in Ireland, and they hadn't seen each other until six years later.)

For a few long moments they do little more than look at each other. Then Shiro starts, suddenly, and crosses back to the other side of the room for the second and a half time, across to the wet bar and ducking behind it.

“We need scotch.”

“Well, naturally,” Adam says thinly then, after hovering a second longer, moves to the low, leather couch and settles himself on it. He sits close to the edge, head turned to watch as Shiro draws glasses from a cabinet under the bar and places them on the counter. From this angle, the sunlight only catches the barest lip of one of the glass, cutting through the thick, clear glass with a glimmer of rich, deep gold. It looks nothing like the gold burnishings decorating the tips of every white thing Upstairs, and Adam finds that he can't look away until Shiro has moved the glasses himself into shadow.

“So what is it, Lagavulin?” Adam asks.

Shiro tuts, his back to Adam as he splashes a spare drop of spring water into the rock glass. (Unmiracled and imported; conjuring it, Shiro has always said, never achieves quite the same effect, and who is he to subject an eighteen year old single malt scotch to anything less than the best?)

“For you, Angel?” He leans up over the bar to reach behind it and pull the bottle by sense memory alone. It's then that Adam realizes that Shiro's voice is steadier, smooth as polished, deep-varnished wood. “Nothing as dark as that.”

“Oh, _honestly_.” Adam breathes the word out the way he is wont to do and Shiro's expression softens for a moment. Mercifully hidden from view, of course. “You act as if I can't hold my liquor. It's only been six millennia, you know.”

“Fine, then.” The scotch is a mellow amber when he pours it, smooth and already smelling like honey and vanilla and a pleasantly burnt citrus as he tops off both glasses. “Then nothing as commonplace. Here.”

Before Adam can take the glass that Shiro offers him, Shiro raises his other finger. “Not all at once. This is Glenmorangie, eighteen years aged. I picked it up in the Highlands myself. _Savor_.”

“Seems like a lot of work,” Adam murmurs as Shiro turns back to grab his own glass before settling in the armchair across from the couch. Instead of drinking, Shiro watches Adam for a moment, watches him lift the glass to his lips and let the liquid settle before taking a long, slow sip. It's only when Adam swallows, his eyelids shuttering for a moment, that Shiro attends to his own share. Adam, of course, does not see this. By the time he turns, Shiro has already taken his first sip and settled back a little in the armchair.

Adam sits back as well, letting himself feel the warm path the scotch has cut down his throat. It glimmers with flavor – citrus and warm vanilla and that unmistakable kiss of alcohol that reminds him of Shiro with a deep, distant ache even though Shiro is right here, beside him.

Apropos of nothing, Shiro says, “We won't have this, anymore.”

“– This?”

Fingers around the glass as if they and the glass were made for each other, Shiro swirls his drink. It catches the light at the outer edge of its arc before swimming back and settling into honeyed darkness. “From what I remember, Upstairs isn't too fond of intemperance. And no one Downstairs ever developed a taste for the finer things in life.”

“Ah.”

“The human things.”

There's the ghost of something in Shiro's voice that Adam can't quite label – something driving and a little rough without making his timbre catch. Adam levels his gaze at him as he takes another sip, lips brushing blithely against the rim of the glass, lingering delicately as he does as instructed and savors – the scent, the sensation of the liquid, the first barely-there burn before he swallows.

They have always known of the possibility of Armageddon. Every angel has, every demon. Even a good million more than a handful of humans has learned and believed in the eventual end of the world. Theologians and scholars have, through their few millennia of existence, what this apocalypse would look like, what form it would take, even when it would be. All guesses until now, posed by historian and layperson alike, have been wrong, of course, as the earth is still very much intact. And it's not as if any human would know before any of the Lord's angels. Or representatives on earth.

But there is a difference wider and deeper than a canyon between knowing the possibility of something and hearing of its inevitable enactment in Gabriel's crisp, unyielding voice. Adam glances back down at his glance.

“No,” he says finally, tilting his hand until the scotch within can catch the light. Up close, the gold of the evening sun seems to spread like milk through coffee, catching all the highlights and turning them amber. He can taste the color. “They don't have much use for human things.”

Shiro makes a noise, not his laugh of wind through leaves but something just as brittle and haunted. Breaking his own rules, he tips the glass back and drinks the entire contents in one sharp swallow, and only when he's done does he reply. “Suppose the only books they'll want are bibles. If they even like bibles.”

“Sparingly,” Adam answers without being asked a question. “But, yes.”

“Or propaganda posters from human wars, if it's my side,” Shiro adds, still tipped back and looking at the ceiling. “And the pharmaceutical pamphlets from doctor's waiting rooms.”

“That was you?”

“As far as they know. But it's not my fault capitalism does my job for me.”

“Ah yes, that sloth.” Adam's lips quirk up at the side. Even though Shiro has drained his glass, Adam takes another careful slip, savoring and slow.

“And music's out. Downstairs we've got some composers, of course. Most of the greats. But two weeks after we get a soul, all they can play is the stuff you hear in elevators.”

“Capitalism?”

“No, actually.” Shiro picks his head up to shoot Adam a look that translates through his glasses, sharp and desperately amused. “That one was me.”

“How nefarious,” Adam concedes. Shiro huffs that noise again and stands, crossing back to the bar. A drop of spring water, then a topped off glass of Glenmorangie, and then he stops to stare at it. “Though Upstairs doesn't have elevator music.”

“Oh?”

“No. Choral music. Harmonies.”

“ _Oh_.” Shiro huffs, then takes a long sip of his drink that leaves half of it gone. “Celestial harmonies.”

Taking a longer drag, Adam nods. “Celestial harmonies.”

Shiro looks at him, then back at his drink, then polishes it off and makes himself another. Adam watches him all the while, taking steady, delicate sips until his glass, too, is empty. Before he can say anything Shiro is beside him, taking it from his hands and fixing him another. Every movement is deft as a moving current and Adam finds that he has to slide his hand down the glass before Shiro grabs at his fingers instead of the intended target – it's a near thing, a whisper of glass between them before Shiro has it in hand and is en route to the bar.

His fingers are just as deft as they work on the refill, playing through shadow and the barest dappled light, a dance that makes Adam's head spin a little to watch.

Without realizing that he's going to speak at all, Adam says, “It seems a waste. To keep getting up.”

Shiro freezes and looks up at him.

Adam holds his gaze. “We're running out of time, after all.”

 

* * *

 

Allura's room is _covered_ in books. Pidge had assumed that she had the market cornered on stocking every available space in her room with things to read but three of Allura's walls are decked out in ceiling to floor shelves and every inch of that shelf space hosts volumes crammed in from end to end. There are books on the desk, in the cubbies, on the bed, and it takes Pidge a moment to realize that Allura's room is – _messy_.

Because it's not just books. Little details realize themselves as she picks her way through the piles of things. The closet is bursting, fabric peaking through where the door doesn't close. There are little wire trees with necklaces and bracelets on them, campus memorabilia hooked onto the mirror, luggage under the bed. Her room is full of _things_ , and it's so different from the way Lance has talked about her and how she had held herself – tall and full of confidence that Pidge doesn't understand – that Pidge can't help but feel herself relax. Enough to split from the group and take up residence in front of one of the bookshelves, reading the titles as Lance falls over himself to do whatever the hell it is that Lance thinks is flirtatious and charming.

“Wow,” he says, “You have a lot of uh – you really moved in here.”

“Oh.” Allura's voice is short and, for the first time Pidge has heard, unsure. (There are a lot of books on history, but all kinds – atlases from all over the world, biographies of world leaders, military tell-alls, long memoirs by royalty.) “Well, I suppose – it is a long way from home. I wasn't sure – what I'd need.”

“Your roommate is cool with all this stuff?” Hunk asks, more curious and kind than anything else.

“I don't – I wasn't – I don't have a roommate.”

“ _Man_.” Lance sighs and Pidge hears him drop into a seat even as she continues to study the shelf. (Astronomy, lots on astronomy. A few things that seem a little more holistic than Pidge cares about – astrology, divination, that kind of nonsense.) “That's the life.”

“Hey!”

“Oh, sorry Hunk. I just mean the rooms are small. Even triples!”

Hunk makes a noise that's halfway between wounded pride and acquiescence.

“Can we get to the point?” Keith's voice is an immediate counterpoint, sharp and cutting quickly through the chatter as if he's being charged by the second for speaking.

“ _Dude_.” Lance's voice doesn't carry anything near the same edged quality that seems to come so naturally to Keith. Pidge huffs a laugh under her breath. (Some stuff on physics, some fantasy literature, some mismatched things that look like they date back to ye olde witch burning days.) “Do you always have to be a jerk?”

“Wh – _always_? We literally met a half an hour ago!”

“And that's all the time I need to know everything about you!”

“No,” Allura cuts in, thoughtful and still less firmly than Keith manages. “Keith is right – we all need to use the atlas. Which means –” 

“We all have a _reason_ to.” Hunk's voice is alight with the interest that's usually stoked by trying to ferret through Pidge's things. Is as much a relief to hear it directed elsewhere as it is grating for its familiarity. “Even though we're coming from disciplines – see! I _told_ you, you discover so much more when you come at it from all the different theoretical lenses.”

Keith murmurs something that suspiciously sounds like you don't know my discipline as she runs her fingers across a few book spines in succession, _Love Letters_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ and a collection of Isabelle Allende's works.

“That's not a bad deduction,” Allura muses, and Pidge hears two more people sit – probably not Keith. He seems like a hover-er, and her instincts are pretty sharp if she does say so herself. “So we should – talk about it, then? What we're researching?”

“ _Yes_.” Hunk's voice is truly alive. (Ethnographies from African scholars, a collection of Eastern European fairy tales.) “Yes, go for it.”

Silence reigns as Pidge reads, enough that she is startled when Keith breaks it. “What? I'm not saying anything.”

“Are you serious?” Hunk asks.

“It's none of your business.”

“Dude!” Lance sounds far more indignant, despite the fact that, to Pidge's knowledge, he doesn't have a stake in all this. And it doesn't sound like it'll be for Allura's benefit, if he argues. But there he is, barreling on as Pidge glances past the White House tell-alls, which seem to be suspiciously farther out on the shelf than the rest. She digs behind them. “What is your problem?”

“What's _yours_?” Keith snaps. “This _wasn't_ my idea. I don't even know you – _any_ of you. Why doesn't Allura share first? She started this.”

“I –” There's a note of fluster in Allura's voice, pinched and caught between offended and bewildered, and then all of a sudden Pidge hears her wilt. “– It's not that I – _dislike_ any of you. But the nature of my research is – delicate.”

“ _Seriously_?” Hunk and Keith say at the same time.

“Hey!” Lance is quick on the draw. “She's entitled to her privacy!”

“ _Then why am I not_?”

“ _Because you're rude_!”

Behind the tell-alls is something solid – something book shaped. Pidge yanks it free with little effort, only taking care when she realizes that the thing is hand-bound. Its leather cover is a faded, soft tawny brown and its pages are a thick sort of parchment that doesn't look anything like the gimmicky, modern productions meant to evoke a bygone era. It looks – _real_.

She doesn't know if Allura has been watching her all the while, or if her timing is truly terrible, because the moment Pidge starts leafing through it, Allura calls to her, “Please, don't touch that!”

Pidge doesn't put the book down, but she does close it and adjust her glasses as she turns on her heel to the group. Ignoring the way everyone has fixed their gaze firmly on her, she asks, “What's Oriande?”

 

* * *

 

“Absolutely _not_.”

When they started, the Glenmorangie was not only full – it had never been opened. They are well on their way, now, to the last quarter. Shiro has abandoned his post at the bar and his seat at the armchair both, having decided somewhere in the last hour that the couch must be the most practical choice. At least, Adam must assume as much; it's easier for both of them to reach the bottle, taking turns drinking straight from its mouth. And though they've been at it long enough for the sun to have gone down, when Adam takes another drag after his protest his lips hover against the rim of the bottle all the same, lingering against the thick, curved glass the flares just enough to rest against his mouth in turn.

It's warm, almost deliriously so. The taste of orange and vanilla and honey never leaves him, even when the buzz of the alcohol all blends into a wall of background noise against his taste buds. But even three quarters of the way through one of a kind, eighteen year old, single malt scotch, Adam cannot imagine a world where he _agrees_ to this ridiculous plan of working together, angel and demon, to save the world.

“Adam, _please_.” Neither of them are slurring – six thousand years must be enough time, then, to build up a strong constitution. But Shiro's voice reminds Adam of the bottle and rocks glasses now, thick and distorting the light as much as it captures it – clear and rounded off. Solid in his hand. (Perhaps his constitution is not quite what it should be after so many millennia.)

“Takashi –”

“Are you telling me that you're alright with this? That you've resigned yourself to – to living without drinks. Without books or music or the Hudson river in the morning? Without the –” 

“It's not –”

“– The birds, and going to Paris for pastries, and the Sunday paper?”

“I can't – I mean, I _can_ –”

“Gone, it'll be all _gone_ , Adam. All of it. Everything we've – everything you've known. For six thousand years!”

Adam sighs as Shiro takes the bottle back, watches idly as his lips find the bottle, imagines the rush of citrus and summer-sweetness, the sugared ebb and flow of liquid as he tips the bottle back and swallows back enough to keep his throat bobbing for a few moments after he's set the thing back against his knee. It is better, maybe, than imagining his shop turning to dust or catching on fire or crumbling in some crack in the ground. It is better, maybe, than thinking of Leophis & Co. collapsing in on itself, the park razed and a ghost of its lush early-fall growth.

He flexes his hands, corporeal and real, more than six millennia old. He imagines the things they have touched (the volumes in the libraries at Timbuktu and Alexandria, the stem of a champagne flute on a rooftop in the city in 1927, tickets to trains, a shroud dropped by one of the humans at the earliest death-ceremonies). He imagines the things they have not touched (the marble of _David_ , Takashi's hair, the scar that has always stretched across the bridge of his nose as long as Adam has known him).

“– It's what is meant to be,” Adam says quietly to his hands. After a few moments of silence, the bottle presses into them. He looks up to catch Shiro's eye, and though he takes the bottle from him he doesn't drink. “You know that. You _know_ that we can't simply _ignore orders_.”

He says the words around a shard of something in his throat that hadn't been there through most of the bottle. Shiro's jaw locks, visible by the minute flickering of the muscle at the notch below his ear. (This is something else that Adam has never touched. In an effort to be honest, Adam does not know _why_ he's cataloging these things. Details are important to humans, and though Adam is not and never has been human, he has his details all the same. And here, in this moment, his detail is that he has never, in six thousand years, pressed his hand against Shiro's face.)

Shiro is looking at his own hands. And then he is back to looking at Adam. Adam does not look away, even when he finally relents and chases the last dregs of summer in the scotch. Only then does Shiro say, quiet enough that Adam can hardly hear him, “Do I?”

That is when Adam gets stuck. It could be the alcohol, making his corporeal brain swim and his corporeal heart beat a little faster, but he sticks on the words like a ship snagged by a rock in rough seas. Hadn't he asked himself the same, only days ago? If Shiro _knew_ where the lines were – if he remembered their places in the grand scheme of things, the both of them, and what it means to forget? What consequences follow on the heels of questioning one's purpose in this existence? How it could be Shiro, of the two of them, who showed so little regard for that line time and time again?

But when he imagines the two eventualities – the destruction of the world, juxtaposed the fury that would await either of them in the wake of betraying the duties assigned to them – Adam thinks that one that terrifies him to the marrows of his corporeal bones isn't the one that _should_.

Does Shiro know that they cannot ignore orders?

Does Adam?

He moves the bottle to the neutral space between them and Shiro picks it up but he plays with it. The little that is left swirls against the glass curve. It's too late now for it to pick up any of the day's light – that's long gone.

“Have you had that the whole time?” Adam feels curiously disconnected from his lips, as if they are too warm and buzzing to feel them. When Shiro cants his head curiously at him, Adam clarifies, “That body. Have you had that the whole time?”

The noise that Shiro makes in the back of his throat is rumbling, but not offended. After a moment's contemplation, he nods. “Yeah. You?”

“I have.”

They don't need to say more than that. They are both aware of what it means – that they have never lost their bodies, issued when the masses of the Fallen Below initiated war against Those Above. After all, to fight a war one must have a way of doing it, and the corporeality of bodies makes for an advantageous way with weapons. This is how the story has been told – to every angel, as if from the lips of the Almighty herself.

Seized with an insatiable curiosity, Adam asks, “What do they say about the war?”

“What?”

“Down there. What do they say about it?”

“ _Angel_.”

Adam's eyes narrow and his lips pull down at the corners. “What? I'm merely making conversation – and I'm not asking for the _truth_. I only mean to know what the – the stories are.”

“The stories.” Shiro's voice is unreadable. Adam glances down.

“If you don't want to –”

“– No.” Rubbing his eyes dislodges his glasses, and Shiro makes sure they are back in place before continuing. “The story, the official one from the head office, is that at a certain point, the numbers of the Fallen became too great, too massive for Upstairs to tolerate. Fearing a rebellion on a scale that they wouldn't be able to control, the Almighty waged war on those who had turned on her, and in the end consigned them to their existence – well. Y'know. Below.”

Below – below the angels, below humankind, below, below, below. Of course, there's no real above and below, not in the cardinal direction sense that humans have attached themselves to. But thinking of a truly Above, Above, thinking that the earth might physically be beneath it, it's – Adam feels a moment of relief that becomes gratitude that his job and his position are what they are.

To be, to have been, _on earth_.

An earth that will be gone.

“D'you remember that garden – ”

“How could I forget?” Shiro cuts in and this time does laugh, wind through leaves. Adam grins.

“No, not _that_ one. Back a few hundred years after, when the humans had built that big settlement off the river.”

“They made a garden?”

“They did. Their first one all on their own.” It had been a clumsy attempt, with mismatched flowers and plants they'd come to find soon enough that were edible. A mix of blooming things and things to harvest, hidden away out of sight of the village. “No urban planning back then, of course.”

“Naturally,” and there is humor in Shiro's voice.

“But one night I went to examine it – just to see. Perhaps Bless their harvest, a little. The moment I walked in, I was – _overwhelmed_. By the Feeling that was there. So warm and large, like a living thing that grabbed at me until I could have burst with it. It was _loved_.”

“... Is that right?”

Adam watches Shiro rub his face again, this time pushing his glasses up until they rest in his hair. The black frames and lenses cut through the shock of white at the front and pin those locks against the rest, making a little puff of contrasting colors. When Shiro's eyes flutter open after he is done rubbing them, he keeps his face angled to his drink and Adam cannot see them.

“Yes,” he replies softly. “They loved that place. They were so thankful to have food near, and so happy to give each other these colorful, blooming, growing things, even if it served no purpose than to be beautiful, to be given.”

“Well,” Shiro replies, just as soft, “That's a purpose.”

His voice is the rich wood of the room, the clean and unassuming furniture, the soft curves and dark lines. Adam nods. “I suppose that is.”

What they don't say is that, too, will disappear. The fine foods and rare books and vintage first pressings of records will be gone, but so will the rest. The gardens and love letters hidden in the language of flowers. The giving of gifts _just because_. The humans, and everything they have built for better or worse or defying judgement at all.

“– It's a good memory to hold onto,” Shiro adds, catching his lower lip between his teeth then letting it go.

“You never saw it, then? The garden?”

“I _saw_ it, but, well.” He gestures with one hand, a little sweeping motion. “You know. It's not the same.”

“It isn't?”

Shiro must be reacting to something in Adam's voice (perhaps it comes across strange; Adam does feel a little raw in his wanting to know) because he looks up then, his black, blank eyes still conveying a kind of surprise that cuts right through Adam. (Another thing his hands have never touched: the soft flesh of Shiro's eyelid, the way his lashes dust over the waterline.)

“I'm a demon, Adam.” Shiro says it slowly, as if telegraphing every syllable. “I can't sense love. I can't Feel it.”

It's as if Adam can't put the words together, at first. The clash between the visceral memory written into the fiber of this body, stepping into a place that has been _loved_ , and Shiro's clarification as if it is nothing to have never sensed that. Known it, Felt or felt it. Maybe he takes too long to process it, because in the midst of the silence Shiro looks away and Adam can no longer see his eyes for what they are.

Carefully, boldly, Adam says, “You weren't always a demon.”

The line of Shiro's mouth hardens, then relaxes. “No. I wasn't. But I always have been with humans.”

Something cracks in Adam's chest, an old ship breaking under its own weight. “I'm sorry,” he murmurs. Shiro waves at him again.

“Nothing to apologize for. I'd say I miss it, but I suppose I _can't_ miss it.”

“Sensing love?”

Shiro makes a noise, and his lips press into a thin line that could almost look like a smile, if you didn't think too hard on it. “Sure,” he says, stretching the word into a sigh. “Ah, well, it doesn't matter. I can't remember the feeling, so I can't miss it.”

Adam is silent for a moment. Then, carefully, “Not only love. Loving. _Loved_.”

Shiro turns to him, studies him. There is something in Shiro's expression that sits like a knife between Adam's ribs (and he does not know, and cannot guess, that Shiro feels precisely the same in that moment), and when Adam inhales sharply like he's made some great discovery, Shiro looses a noise almost like a laugh and finally looks down.

“Don't go patting yourself on the back just yet, Angel. You're not all right there.”

“But I am a little.”

“A little?”

“A little right. Some right.”

When Shiro glances back up, Adam is still looking at him, long and piercing. What Adam does not know is that it's too much like some holy lightning for Shiro to bear. But he can guess at it, when Shiro slyly lets the sunglasses drop over his face again and takes a long, hard drink from the bottle.

“You think too much, Angel. That's always been a nasty habit of yours. Thinking too much of everyone else, and of yourself.”

“Takashi –”

“If you want to debate philosophy, find some graduate student following in Aristotle's footsteps. I'm just trying to save the world, or whatever.”

Adam makes to apologize, again, but he can't – because Shiro has told him not. Because he's not – he doesn't _feel_ sorry at wanting to know if Shiro understands love. If he feels it, if he remembers it, if he wants it.

 _Oh_. But then (and Shiro's words come back to him, pleading with him to listen for chatter, to think of what will be destroyed, to turn his back on everything because all of this – everything they've known, everything the humans know – will be gone) – then he realizes that _feeling_ and _understanding_ might not be mutually exclusive.

When Adam speaks again, his voice is weak. “But it's part of the Plan, isn't it? That the world must end?”

Shiro coughs on a breath, harsh and low. “And?”

“Wh – what do you mean _and_?”

“Exactly what I said. _And_?” Shiro is still looking down at his bottle but even from this angle Adam can see the hard lines around his mouth, at the corners of his eyes. The tense set of his neck, the way his fingers are clenched. “How does the end of the world help anyone? What does it do? How is that – how is that, what does she call it, how is that everlasting love? Taking everything, for the sake of a war?”

“ _Taksahi_!” Adam sits up, spine rigid, fulling facing Shiro even if he won't look up at him. “How could you ask that?”

“What will happen? I'll Fall again?”

“That's not –”

“You think Downstairs _cares_ if I can't stand the hypocrisy of it all?”

Adam draws in a breath, tries not to choke on it. “ _Takashi_ , it's not – it's _what's best_ –”

“What's best!” Shiro leans forward to place the bottle on the coffee table; it lands with a loud, echoing thud. “You _have_ to be kidding me – after that whole deal with the flood and the rainbow – after she _promised_ to love – to –” He stumbles, but it is not the stumble of someone soaked in too much alcohol. His jaw pops again. “– And every angel just – _allows_ it. As if it's the right thing to do, because she _said_ so –”

“It's serving the humans!” Adam interrupts, jagged and desperate. “It's for them – for their _best interests_ – their own good –”

“That's not _altruism_ , that's _cowardice_. That's hiding behind someone stronger and telling yourself that that's enough – that suddenly you're not culpable for pain and suffering because you didn't make the plan. That pain and suffering don't even matter because those are for humans!”

“So what, you hate me, then? All this time?”

Shiro looks up as if he's been burned, lips parted. If his eyes were still visible, Adam suspects they'd be open wide.

“What – no, I – you're not –”

“Not like them.”

“That's – not exactly, but you're – you're not –”

“I am an _angel_ , Shiro.” His voice is thin and crackling like ice. “I am not like them – I _am_ them. I don't know why you can _never_ seem to remember our places in the grand scheme of things.”

Silence rings between them. Shiro draws one breath, then another. He doesn't move, doesn't speak. Adam's pulse roars in his ears – not human, but his for so long that it sometimes strikes him as not angelic either. The crack on the thing in his chest creeps outwards, burning up the length of his throat, his jaw, behind his eyes.

Finally, Shiro exhales and looks down.

“I think – you should probably go.”

Adam realizes in a rush that he does not want to – vibrating with things he cannot name (things that humans might call fury, fear, pain, grief, things he cannot Feel), knowing how terrible this could be, that there is no short of hurt between them – no matter the reasons he should go, there is nowhere Adam wants to be than here, in the dark of this apartment, a hand's breadth away from Shiro.

 _No_ , he wants to say.

Wants, wants, wants, when he should never _want_ in the first place.

The crack opens, a little. And he knows that whatever is beyond it is limitlessly deep, impenetrably dark.

 

* * *

 

In the beginning, there were four of them. They weren't called anything at all, mostly because there weren't the words to describe them, not yet. They were born not long after humanity; the first one was Death.

It came as a whisper through the grass, waiting until the moment it might breathe itself to life when the first breathed themself to Death's embrace. Death stood silent as the first one to die drifted away from their consciousness. Taking their hands into its own, Death said nothing. They merely walked, side by side with the first, and when they passed from the world of humans into another, the humans learned that Death would come for all of them, eventually, each in their time.

The second was Famine. It started in the winters, when the growing things stopped growing and the animals moved elsewhere. The water froze over, and those who lived found themselves with nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Famine called for Death not at the natural end, but when starvation found them and clawed the meat from their bones and left them hollow. The humans learned to follow the animals, then, and the flowing rivers. To save their food for the months where things don't grow. To race ahead of Famine.

The third was Pestilence. It started in the summers, in the unclean things. In wounds picked up innocently that would fester under the heat of the sun, in the animals that would die and the crops that would turn brown and wither. The humans took longer to learn the lesson of Pestilence, who called Death when nothing seemed wrong at all until everything seemed wrong all at once. Over time, the humans learned of cleanliness and medicine, and to always look over their shoulder for Pestilence.

War came last. It started when one saw what their hands might do to another. It started in the violence of that hurt, and the grief of that hurt, and though it started slowly, only calling to Death every now and then, it grew. It swept like the bloodied end of a scythe through stalks of wheat, razing what it passed. It grew like the howling, keening voice of loss, and the hunger of greed, and the venom of poisonous whispers. Humans learned, more quickly than all the rest, that War did not stalk them – War came to them, and they could use it.

In the beginning, War came last. When the horsemen are called again, War will always come first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an analogy: abba : this fic :: queen : the original. // comments are 100% necessary so i know what's working and not working for you guys.
> 
> disasterganes.tumblr.com
> 
> playlist selections // [the winner takes it all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXFa7D41_ww) & [creep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk)


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